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Just a lifetime ambition fulfilled, that’s all

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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.

 

Doctor Who Doing Time on BBC iPlayer 2015

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.

I’ve been framed

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beiderbecke frame

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.

fortunes of war

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.

Fortunes script

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.

two shot beiderbecke fortunes

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.

It’s my job, it’s what I do

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Quick aside? I love the line “It’s my job, it’s what I do” because to me it is the archetypal ridiculous line you used to get from so many cop shows. I say it with earnest dry seriousness and I am of course kidding. Unfortunately, it turns out that not everyone knows that TV cop show trope and one day I found out I had been seriously, seriously, seriously annoying an entire newsroom.

I’d like to say that I stopped using it but there are times when it still springs into my head unbidden. Such as now. I was just thinking about this thing I want to discuss with you and there it was, there was this old line. And I rather mean it this time.

Follow. A friend, Mary Ellen Flynn, said this to me recently after a tearoom natter:

I like your perspective since you are businesslike about writing but you still love it.

My lights, it has actually become true: this is my job, this is what I do.

I’m split now. She meant it as a compliment and I take it as one, but it’s sent me spiralling off into pondering the differences and the similarities and the Venn Diagrams of writing vs business, of art vs work. Then, okay, that’s further sent me off pondering how I have the nerve to call what I do art but fortunately I don’t. One dilemma at a time, please.

I think the reason I’m mithered over this is that her line reminded me of how I’ve previously been accused of being a commercial writer. It was not a compliment. Whoever it was – and I’m genuinely blanking on their name – pointed out that I write Doctor Who radio dramas and that every idea I was telling them was out-and-out commercial. Every idea was a thriller, a romance or both.

Oh, grief. I’ve just had a thought. If it were who I now think it might have been, she was writing literary fiction and it was bad. God in heaven, it was bad. One of the single most creative pieces of writing I’ve ever done is the way I answered her about what I thought of a certain chapter without telling her what I thought of a certain chapter. You’re asked your opinion in order to give your opinion but sometimes, no, the truth is best left out there.

Anyway. I like literary fiction but my best definition of it is a book that doesn’t fit into any other genre. Equally I suppose you can argue that the definition of a commercial text is that it is written to make money. It amuses me that she failed totally at being literary and I’m doing a good job at failing to make money.

Yet for all that I am supposedly commercial and for all that I agree I am businesslike, the fact is that I write romances and thrillers because I love them.

They excite me, they totally compel me and maybe I can’t do them well yet but I’m trying.

There is the part of my brain that recognises the existence of a mortgage and how nice it is to eat around three times a day. There is the part of my brain that knows deadlines and understands a brief and can copywrite and can build a structure, build an event. That’s the businesslike bit that is very easy for me; frankly because anything is easier than writing.

I said that all this pondering and noodling came from that friend’s line about my being businesslike. I was doing a talk last week and trying to convey a point about writing as a career, as a job. You know how you don’t know something until you say it?

This is what I think, this is what I do, this is what I said:

I write for a living – but I really write for a life.

It’s not you, it’s me

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Okay, you may have trouble swallowing this considering how I go on at you every week. But when we meet in person, I am infinitely – infinitely – more interested in you than I am in me. Have I said this to you before? I tell you everything, I must’ve mentioned it: my attitude when nattering away with someone is that I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s talk about you.

Truly, time spent talking about me is wasted and boring. I’m not knocking myself, I’m just not interested and I have plenty of time to know me, I might get only minutes with you. And look at you: look at all you’re doing, all you know that I don’t, how could I possibly waste any time talking about me?

I got told off for this today.

I saw a friend for a coffee – she’s Steph Vidal-Hall, she does coaching for creatives and you could look her up right now – and she is doing so much that is so interesting. I was really looking forward to learning about it all.

And I did find out a lot but she also tricked me.

Before I knew it, I was telling her about a job I have on that is worrying me, about projects that are vastly delayed because of my cold, and I was even telling her about a thing recently that went spectacularly well for me.

Clearly I will never have coffee with this woman again.

She argued that this is how conversation between friends is supposed to be. I can’t disagree. I do also wonder if I’m a bit selfish in conversations, wanting to ditch me and talk about you.

This is all a small and maybe obvious point but I’m thinking about it a lot now. Previously, I admit this, I’ve liked that I put the spotlight on you. That’s mostly because that is exactly where the spotlight should be, but also we’ve all had people who can barely hide that they exist to tell you about themselves. So I have enjoyed not being like that.

Plus, my lights, you cannot believe the things people have told me. It is amazingly flattering and I’d give you examples but for how that would be rather destroying the whole trust that I seem to have got from strangers and friends alike.

I’ve looped around this thought before and always managed to kick it to the kerb. But today’s friend did two things that fixed the issue in my head and also made me want to talk to you about it.

First, she pointed out that she has previously enjoyed our chats but gone away feeling bad that they had been so completely about her.

And, second, she helped me.

I have this job on and I am nervous about it. I’m still nervous, I’m not going to say she changed my mind and has made me look forward to it, but she gave me a nudge that helped. It’s a nudge that may mean I get over these particular nerves given time, it definitely means I had a moment when I actually felt relaxed.

Also, she bought the tea.

If we were chatting face to face now I’d be grabbing your arm and bringing you over to her.

Let’s all get a tea some time and you can tell us about you, Steph can tell us about her, and hopefully you’ll both take long enough that I have time to make up some interesting lies.

You can’t go home. But at least you can shop there

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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.

Hide the card

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There’s this thing I don’t have a word or a phrase for and I’d like to have, so I’m going to talk it over with you and see where we get. Also, it relates in part to a TV series that is presumably coming to the UK soon, so, you know, hang on in here, work with me on this.

I believe that writers can sense a good idea, somehow smell it. Taste it. So far, so obvious: we all recognise when something has potential. But we taste the full strength of that idea and – this is the key bit – we know just how great and effective and powerful it will be when we’ve worked out how to tell it to you.

I need an example. Try this. I’m working on a theatre project and after a very intense meeting about all sorts of things to it, I mentioned the ending. I don’t have the script, I haven’t written an outline. As it happens, I can recite to you the opening scenes but after that we have about ninety minutes of I-have-no-idea until we reach the last moments and specifically the last line.

Given who I was working with, I was happy to tell them everything and I needed to in order to get the job done, but I wouldn’t tell them that line. Alan Plater once wrote about a TV idea that he “knows the A and the Z and has a rough idea of B to about K”. I’ve got A, B and Z. So there I am, sitting in a pub, having discussed a project that I’ve worked on for at least 17 months and there is no chance you’ll see before 2016, and I will not tell the ending because I know it sounds weak without the beginning and middle.

Yet.

I struggled to say that I even had an ending because I literally struggled to say, to speak. I got choked up thinking of it. And I do every time. I can remember where I was the moment I first thought of it – I was on a bus going by the Birmingham Rep – and I choked.

I know I’ll get you.

I just have no idea how.

So assuming that I’m right, what is the right phrase for… tasting the idea, smelling the idea, sensing it? The ability to feel the full force of something that has no force until I’ve written everything that takes you on that specific trip from here to there.

I do know that it is tied in to what you reveal and when. (There’s that Suzanne Vega line from Pornographer’s Dream: “What she reveals / and what she conceals / is the key to our pleasure”)

There is a right moment for a story to bring you a particular key fact. Up until then it has to have other great ideas, it has to lead you down other lines that are equally good, equally interesting, but which you can pull away as you reveal the real… something.

The biggest TV drama surprise I can think of was a moment in Battlestar Galactica that I will not spoil even now. But if you saw the show, yes, I mean that one, that moment. And when it was airing, the creator Ronald D Moore used to do a podcast audio commentary: ten or more years on, I can remember him describing this scene as we watched. And he used the term “hide the card”. He kept repeating it – “hide the card, hide the card” – like it was a conjuring trick.

I suppose it was, I suppose all this is, but it feels cheapening to call it that.

What he specifically meant was that in this particular scene, we were set up to expect many, many things and it fulfilled them all. It seemed to tell us everything, if it had just done what we believed it was doing it would’ve been strong and effective but he didn’t reveal his hand until the last moment. I actually jumped out of my seat.

It was a shocking moment and the shock came as much from how brilliantly set up and misdirected we were as it is from what actually happened in that moment.

That’s the thing I think writers have. We know what that moment is going to feel like even when we haven’t set it up yet. Our job then is to set it up properly. Our difficulty is getting you to the point we sensed.

It is fracking hard. (I have got to watch that show again.)

And I think you can get it very easily, very badly wrong. This is why this is on my mind today, this is where the new TV show comes in.

It’s a comedy called A to Z – no connection with Alan’s comment – which is the first time I have ever tuned in to anything because of the cast. It’s a romcom, and I like romcoms a lot, this time starring Cristin Milioti. Also Andrew Lofland but I’d not heard of him. Milioti was remarkable in the final season of How I Met Your Mother which broke every storytelling sense I’ve got in how after eight years of never showing us the Mother of the title, made her the star of the ninth year. I think the writing of that was bold and supremely well done, I thought Milioti played the part terrifically, I was sorry it was the final season.

So her back in a new romcom, I gave it a go.

It’s not great. It’s also cancelled. It made A to about M. I’d have said that to you anyway, just as a gag, but it’s pretty much literally true too: each episode was named after a letter of the alphabet. The pilot was called “A is for Acquaintances”, for instance. Each week, a narrator would explain that “this television programme is the comprehensive account of their relationship… from A to Z.” She explains this a lot.

Quick setup. A stands for Andrew, who works at an online dating agency. Z is Zelda, which is the name you would only ever give a character if you really, really had to have her begin with that letter. No other reason possible.

We have no idea who the narrator is. Think of How I Met Your Mother’s narration by Old Ted, except that we don’t know who is speaking. I saw five episodes, I think, and we never knew, despite getting quite a lot of narration. I assumed that the narrator was just a device and a lazy one at that.

Is it hiding the card that actually yes, the narrator is a real character and we just haven’t been told yet?

No.

A draft script for the pilot episode of A to Z by Ben Queen is now online at Lee Thomson’s brilliant TV Scripts site and you can read it right now.

If you do, then the first line you read will be:

Our NARRATOR is female, in her 50s. Think Diane Keaton (or someone equally cool if that person exists)

Twenty-six pages later, Andrew has a folder of material about the online dating agency – here called Crush, changed in production to Wallflower – and:

He opens the file. Inside are press clippings about ‘Crush’ from its origins. We maybe see a glimpse of its founder JULIET MADDOX (who will turn out to be our NARRATOR).

Twenty-six pages. And over those twenty-six pages, our NARRATOR has twenty-nine speeches.

If you’re thinking that’s fine, it let us dangle before telling us, look at that direction again.

We maybe see a glimpse of its founder JULIET MADDOX (who will turn out to be our NARRATOR).

Nearly thirty pages and very nearly thirty speeches in, viewers do not learn who the narrator is. In the episode as aired, there is a file folder, he is carrying it, it does have newspaper clippings (about an online site? seriously?) but he doesn’t open it, it isn’t referred to, the whole exchange of dialogue about it is cut. The sole way to know that it’s about the narrator and who that will be is to read the script. I actually said aloud “Oh, okay” when I read that.

You need to hide the card, sure. But you have to have the card in play. Or you won’t get the audience to that great point you’ve smelled and tasted and sensed from the start. Maybe because they won’t stick with you that long, maybe because your show is cancelled before you get around to it.

A few thrilling moments: 2014

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Two things. First, “I’ve had a few thrilling moments” is a quote either from Grosse Pointe Blank or Ally McBeal. I forget which, I just use it a lot.

Second, this is a stupid idea. Stop reading this. And definitely do not do what I do.

I’ve been enjoying reading blogs about what people got up to this year, I’ve been enjoying those a lot, and I did think it would be spectacularly easy to do one myself. Of course it would: I have a trick.

Follow. Last year I did this thing, right, and by mistake believed I was supposed to report back at the end of each month. I was entirely wrong. But it took a good six months for them to say, William, look, it’s all very nice, but… And in those six months I had learnt something. I learnt that having to account to someone made me do things that were accountable. Most especially in the last week of each month. Oh, yes. I’m a demon from the 27th onwards.

Consequently I ignored these fine people and continued reporting back to the end of the project – and then I carried on doing it over on The Blank Screen productivity website. That version is a bit sanitised, a bit more careful, but it’s all there and it’s all true every month. And yep, 27th onwards, demon.

I’ve got this down now, I really have: when I’ve done something, I make the tiniest of notes in Drafts 4 on my iPhone and know that it is squirrelling it all away into an ever-lengthening document over in Evernote. Effort on my part: pretty close to zero. Result on its part: the demon run of the 27th onwards.

So doing you a list for the year should’ve been a doddle. It was an enormous doddle. Couldn’t have been easier. Open Evernote, select all, copy, paste, go make some tea.

Except.

I’m not stupid, I think the list is okay. I think I did alright. If pushed, I would say that I’m pleased with 2014.

But have you spotted the ENORMOUS FLAW yet? I have nothing in 2015. Not a bean. This year, not bad. Next year, tundra blowing across the hills. There should be a couple of books coming out, possibly even three, and I’ve been booked for some events that I am spectacularly looking forward to. But tomorrow morning I get back to this desk and I look at the very blankest of blank screens.

Frozen. Paralysed.

At least until January 27th.

If you’ve read this far, thank you and it’s been a treat talking with you this year. If you read on to the list, you’re mad and I am even now dialling NHS Direct to get you some help.

William

2014

Writing: approximately 620,000 words

Books:
Filling the Blank Screen (September 2014)
The Blank Screen Guide: Blogging (January 2015)
Editing Catherine Schell’s autobiography (2015)

Speaking engagements:
88 talks, workshops and presentations including:
Page Talk panel discussion at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Representing the Writers’ Guild in the House of Commons for Parliament’s Birmingham Day
Promoted the Writers’ Guild at two RTS Mini-Summits including one at BBC Nottingham
Spoke at Combrook Readers’ Group for short story I’m writing for them
Performed three workshops at Original Writing Day in Newman University
Ran three-day workshop at Fircroft College
Many Young Writers’ Write On! group sessions for Burton, Birmingham, Rugby
The Writers’ Toolkit: produced one panel, spoke on a second, chaired a third
Three productivity workshops for the Federation of Entertainment Unions

Produced Events:
9 including:
One Steven Knight interview evening for the Screenwriters’ Forum
A separate Steven Knight event at the BBC Drama Village for the Writers’ Guild and the Royal Television Society
“Women in Theatre” panel discussion at the Birmingham Rep
Erica Whyman Royal Shakespeare Company event for Writers’ Guild
Royal Television Society Film and TV Summit breakout sessions

Fiction, drama and poetry:
Doctor Who: Scavenger radio drama released
River Passage: earned Arts Council England funding for poetry app
Wrote and shot “Ye Olde 3G” 30-second video promo: won an iPad Air
Thirty-minute stage play “Murder at Burton Library”
Directed “Murder at Burton Library” for Burton Young Writers
Resistance: radio, theatre and TV proposals; dozen script pages
Transferable Skills (4 pages of script)
Soundscapes education scripts (2015)
Wrote poem “My Curse” for Jo Bell’s 52
1x poem ‘Heart’ (100 words)
Revised novels “Man and Wifi”, “Transferrable Skills”
New novel “Men Win” 10,000 words
Seven short stories including The Book Groups for West Midlands’ Readers’ Network and The Flare, a GISHWHES short story by request

Blogs:
The Blank Screen: 1,229 articles
Self Distract: 56 articles
Guest blogs: 9

Attended:
Theatre: 25 shows
Other (meetings, workshops): 54

Journalism:
Edited Write On! Magazine issues 3, 4 and 5
Radio Times reviews 10
Magazine tutorial feature re iPad
2 ecourses on productivity issues
2 presentations
1 Lifehacker UK article
Launched weekly email newsletter for The Blank Screen
Took over monthly email newsletter for the Writers’ Guild West Midlands
Four iPad software tutorials
MacNN: 30 reviews for US technology site
Wrote Writers’ Guild press release re Library of Birmingham cuts

Publicity:
Photoshoot for Writing West Midlands
Interviewed for From Croydon to Gallifrey podcast
Interviewed in Doctor Who Monthly
Chiefly great reviews on Doctor Who fan sites
Stonking review in Doctor Who Monthly: “Seductively gripping”
From Croydon to Gallifrey podcast interview aired
Radio interview: BBC CWR re anniversary of moon landing and TV history
TV interview: Russia Today

Other:
Became regional representative of the Writers’ Guild
Joined Royal Television Committee
Ran day-long workshops in London, Newcastle and Birmingham for Federation of Entertainment Unions
8 pages copywriting for PR firm
Joined Creative England crew site
Asked to judge RTS awards
Two-day drama meeting with Nadia Kingsley and Tom Wentworth
Na wrote a poem about me
Produced video for Parliament Day and the Writers’ Guild
Promoted the move to get Alan Plater a blue plaque
Produced 2x videos for The Blank Screen site
Writers’ Guild and Royal Television Society event invitation emails
Birmingham Rep theatre programme copywriting for Of Mice and Men and Solomon and Marion
Met with BBC to discuss general projects plus liaising with RTS and Writers’ Guild
Launched The Blank Screen mentoring
Room 204 Buddying Group: took over managing; ran two quiet social events

ENDS

Squeezing your heart

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We get Christmas all wrong. I don’t mean that it should be a religious thing, I’m afraid I am entirely happy with the commercialism. Getting presents is great, giving presents is greater and there is a genuine magic in the air when we like sticking a tree in our living room and draping it in impossibly gaudy tat.

There is no other minute of the year when you’d register that tinsel exists. Can you even buy tinsel outside that so-very-brief Christmassy period of early September to late December?

I’ve just done exactly what I think is wrong. I got one beat into thinking of Christmas and I’m off puzzling about the past. I don’t think a vague wondering about tinsel supply and demand is especially wrong, but there is something inescapable about looking back. Maybe I’m just now old enough that what I mean is this: when you’re really young, Christmas is about presents and when you’re not, then Christmas is about pasts.

If something truly bad ever happened to you within earshot of a Christmas then it’s with you for every Christmas after it. You know this. Forever. If you’ve lost someone, your mind gets constantly pulled to the gap they’ve left. Christmas becomes this seething mass taking place at head height: sometimes you just have to duck down to get away from it, to make it stop.

Look back. Choose to look back. You can’t stop yourself looking back so go with it, go for it. Think about who you’ve lost and what. Change this from a time when you can’t breathe to a time when you celebrate who you had and what.

Just don’t do it for too long.

And hold my hand.

Shelve your ideas

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So some preposterous number of years ago, I interviewed Alan Plater at his then home, a spectacular flat in London. I was very young and rather nervous but wowed by how massive this place was and, especially, how full of bookshelves he and his wife Shirley Rubinstein had it. I wanted the flat, I wanted the bookshelves.

I particularly wanted the bookshelves. I’m not sure I could’ve vocalised this then, I suspect I just drooled, but it seemed a pretty perfect kind of place to live in.

Did I mention the size?

I came away thinking that London flats are superb and that bookshelves are fantastic. I was right about one of those things. While Alan and Shirley’s flat was glorious, it was actually two flats. They were knocked together into one long one and in fact few people in London live like that.

Shirley and Alan became close friends of mine after this but I never went back to that flat. They moved to a gorgeous house – and this time the knocking through and building on turned it into an even more gorgeous house with more levels and rooms and crinkly corners than can truly be appreciated in one sitting. Oh, and book shelves. Lots and lots of bookshelves.

I’ve just realised: when I watch Grand Designs or lesser property shows, my lip does curl just a little at those houses that have no bookshelves. Not fit for purpose, if you ask me.

But I like that I never went back to that flat. It makes that place and that moment a specific little bubble. I’ve never been one for lusting after houses and cars – possibly I have a bit for some Apple gear but give me a break here – but those shelves, that bubble, I wanted it. It felt inextricably bound up in what I wanted my career to be. I did lust after being a writer, even as I thought that was something other people did. Not me. Couldn’t be me.

Turns out, it could.

And all of this came back to me this week as I did a mentoring session over Skype. (I do mentoring for The Blank Screen and Other Stories now. It’s a thing.) During the natter, there was an oooh. Look at the shelves behind William.

I turned around, winced at how I’d forgotten to tidy up, but there they were.

Floor to ceiling bookshelves. Crammed.

Nowhere near as organised as Shirley and Alan’s, but bookshelves aplenty and akimbo.

I haven’t thought about this much in recent years but I’m thinking about it today. Because I look at those shelves of mine and I want them. Just as I wanted Alan and Shirley’s, all that time ago.

And I’ve got them.

A couple of them have copies of my books.

How in the world did that happen?

How 1984 wasn’t much like 1984 and still isn’t

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mac1984

(Image from Mac-History.net)

It’s thirty years since Tommy Cooper died on live TV. It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Colin Baker’s first trip in the TARDIS and of Virgin Atlantic’s inaugural flight. Also, importantly, it’s three decades since some sports thing. But of all the things that happened in 1984, I’m feeling compelled to talk to you about just one –

– no, two.

Officially this is also the 30th anniversary of Cyndi Lauper’s debut album, She’s So Unusual. I remember that so well: I remember the feel of the vinyl in my hands, I remember that it was an unusual impulse buy of an artist I’d only vaguely heard of. I remember that it was the first album that felt like a single body of work to me instead of a series of songs. And I remember that was because it seemed so strikingly clear that Side 1 was terrific – Money Changes Everything, Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Time after Time were all there – and that Side 2 wasn’t.

You don’t remember when albums had sides. I hate you. Give me my biscuits back. For my part, I don’t remember exactly when I bought it but the album came out in 1983 so it bothers me that it’s this year that a 30th Anniversary edition is being released. I’m wondering if they’ll sell me the first half.

But I know I’ll buy it, I know the odds are that I’ll buy it online and I know for a fact – because I’ve just done it – that I called up the original album right now on iTunes. Curiously, it’s the only Cyndi Lauper album that I don’t have complete. It’s not as if I stopped ripping the CD half way either. I’ve a patchwork of songs from it. Definitely going to buy the thirtieth, then.

So it’s 05:46 and Girls Just Want to Have Fun is in my headphones, I’m writing to you in Evernote, my email inbox is teetering, my calendar is throbbing and my OmniFocus To Do list is wiping its brow. Every part of that sentence, bar the stupidly early time, is tied up with my Mac.

And that’s the one thirtieth anniversary I really am compelled to write to you about.

It’s actually thirty years to the day that the Macintosh was launched. It would be perhaps five years before I used one but the Mac that launched in 1984 directly changed me: it stopped me being interested in computers. I know I’m talking to you about machines and that at least software tends to come up a lot with us, but that really is what it did: after I used a Mac, I wasn’t into computers.

Maybe I never really was into them – I’m certainly not as technically minded as so very many people I know – but I think I enjoyed the puzzle of them. I definitely enjoyed all the fiddling with all the settings and the options. That day at school, right at the end of the last term, when I found out if you bash your head onto the keyboard in despair it would restart the RML 380Z and save you the usual twenty minute wait while a tape loaded. (“Oh, yes, I meant to tell you,” said the teacher.) The way that I learnt to swear while just trying to fit a bigger hard drive into a PC. (I got it exactly right the first time, motherboard jumpers and all. But it still took me a week of increasingly foul evenings before I got it working by doing exactly the same right thing again.) The satisfaction, even the sheer victory of getting computers to work.

Bollocks to that.

Here was a Mac and it worked. I could write books on it. So I did.

I was still split between Macs and PCs because I got work as features editor on a PC magazine – which is also where I learnt that I am a magazine kinda guy far more than I am a computer one – but nonetheless, when it came time to spend my own money, I bought a Mac. I vividly remember my flat with its Mac and its CD player. (Oh! I played John Barry’s Dances with Wolves soundtrack a lot on that CD player. Hang on – just switched to that on iTunes.)

A few years on, Apple bought me a Mac that had a TV in it. It was a time when Apple was doing badly and apparently its PR firm reckoned it could either spend a lot of money on ads that nobody would write about or they could just buy Macs for a lot of journalists and hope it would have an impact.

It had an impact. I had that Mac throughout the rest of my time living in London. I remember watching Alan Plater’s Doggin’ Around on it. Sitting in my narrow flat, eating my then healthy and obsessively favourite meal of French bread pizza, waffles and sweetcorn, watching that TV. You must’ve been able to record TV on it because I clearly remember watching Northern Exposure when the phone rang and then when I continued watching, the sound was vastly poorer. Mono instead of stereo.

I remember later using a review PowerBook Mac, I think the first with a colour screen, and seeing that screen permanently die in front of me just as I finished writing something. Saving that document, copying it to a floppy disc, gathering up all of my work and copying it off to many floppies – all without being able to see anything at all on the screen. Oh! Another PowerBook Mac, another day: being late delivering an article to Macworld and, knowing the editor would be at the same press launch I had to cover for PC Direct, writing the whole article on a PowerBook on the Tube train on my way. Handing him a floppy.

I don’t miss floppies, I’m not compelled to write to you about floppies.

But I am clearly compelled to write about the Mac today. I’m curious how the one thing I would tell you about these machines is that they get out of my way so that I can get on with writing books, talking to people and watching Alan Plater dramas, yet even as I can forget the computer entirely, I remember that I am forgetting it. I heard an argument once that said Android phones are always so bad that you are driven to upgrade where Apple wants you to like your iPhone so much that you upgrade to get more of the love or whatever. I don’t know enough about Android to judge that: Android phones seem to me to be great for fiddling with and that’s very nice. But I think there’s something to it.

I could not tell you the name or manufacturer or any single thing about the PC that I spent a week inside fitting that bloody hard drive. Nothing. The image of tiny jumper settings is burnt into my retina and I could probably work out from a calendar which version of Windows it had. But I’m not going to.

Whereas I can tell you with impossible fondness that my first Mac back in the 1980s was a Mac SE running System 6.

Ironically, the books I wrote on it were all computer manuals. I remember the boss of the technical author department regretting having bought Macs. “Seriously?” I said.

“Yes.”

I think the man was just bored with his job because he explained that it was because PCs were different. That’s all. He wanted a change. Hadn’t tried Windows, didn’t know anything but that they were different to Macs.

Can’t fault him for technical accuracy, then, and it is entirely coincidental that I left shortly afterwards.