I talked about this the other night at the Best of Tell Me on a Sunday but I didn’t get to say it to you. Not properly, not over a biscuit and a mug of tea. Not just us, you know?

So there’s this thing. It’s half extremely personal and it’s half a bit ordinary. But deciding to tell you about it has actually changed it. Thinking about it, pondering it all, I’ve just changed my mind about it and am now going to do things differently.

It’s about my name and the hot water it’s got me into. Literally my name: William Gallagher. And almost literally hot water. There has been water that was hot. There has also been a – no, we need a sec before I say that.

My name is quite ordinary. I mean, I like it, I secretly love seeing it written on books or in Radio Times or on Doctor Who websites – but it is just “William Gallagher”. Ordinary. Common. And that’s the problem.

There are a lot of me. A huge, gigantic number of William Gallaghers. Once I was invited to join a CompuServe group reserved for William Gallaghers. I refused because a) what would we talk about? And 2) How would we know who were talking about it to?

Nonetheless, many of these William Gallaghers have – well, it’s not that they’ve come in to contact themselves, it’s more that everybody else has. And they’ve confused us. A lot. I mean, a lot.

And that’s why I have a wee problem with the hot water. There are things I could tell you that are potentially just a bit on the libellous side and since this is about what all these people called William Gallagher have done over the years, it’s not as if I could change their names to protect the guilty. Allegedly guilty.

For instance, I can’t tell you about a place and time where I was regularly yanked into the office of, shall we say, someone in authority at a place of education. Now I think of it, I was accused so often that it was potentially just a bit on the slander side. Particularly the one time that police were waiting for me with him. 

So anyway, I’ve left that place of education and joined the BBC. When you join the BBC, you won’t be shocked to learn that you get a BBC email address. And that people email you there. So some time in the early 1990s, two young women from California – two girls, really – emailed me. “Are you Liam Gallagher?” they asked. “You can tell us, we won’t say, promise!”

I don’t know how I knew they were young girls but there was something giggly in that email and then when I replied saying I didn’t even know who he was, there was true teenage dismissal. “God!”

Funny thing, I am related to Liam Gallagher of Oasis. I really am. It’s pretty distant, but I’m genuinely related. Actually, you know how we have all this third-cousin-twice-removed stuff? Nobody ever thinks about where the line ends. There must be a point where you stop saying tenth-cousin-in-law. Got to be. Otherwise, we would all be related to each other and weddings would be murder to cater for. 

So there is a cutoff point between relative and stranger and I can tell you that it’s Noel Gallagher.

I am related to Liam Gallagher of Oasis – but not his brother Noel. 

More oddly, I’m also not related to William Gallagher. I’m a writer, I’m a journalist, I write about and for Doctor Who, and it turns out that there is a William Gallagher who is a journalist and Doctor Who fan who wrote Who magazines. I have never met him. Never even read a word he’s written, either. But…

I used to write for BBC News and BBC Ceefax. One day I did a piece that mentioned Doctor Who fans. This was before the show came back in all its glory and if you were still a fan, there was a chance you had a scarf and a certainty that you had an anorak. I had both. But that didn’t stop me describing Doctor Who fans as tending to be “warmly-dressed”. One fan went mad. He took to Usenet – do you even know Usenet now? – and posted my BBC email address, said he would be complaining about me and that every anorak-wearing Who fan should flood me with emails. 

None of them did. Not one. Not even he did.

I only ever found out because the BBC wanted to know why my name was giving their IT department such trouble.

Even though he didn’t email me, he’d put my address out there. If you list an email address on a comments board, it gets harvested by people who send spam. So the BBC had just switched on a whizzy new system for stopping spam emails and it was working for everybody in BBC News – except my department.

We looked into it and it was only then that I found this discussion about me. The thing with Usenet was that you only had a few days to reply to a comment. Google then archived off everything so you could always look it up, but you could only actually respond within a very few days. By the time we found it, that time was gone. So I sat there in a newsroom reading all this stuff about me – and then not about me. One guy said he had phoned me to discuss this anorak comment and said I had laughed at him. I don’t want to search the archive again and re-read all this unpleasant stuff so I may not be quite accurate here and I’m definitely flinging the word ‘allegedly’ at you a lot, but there was something about how this me on the phone had been all superior because he was the great BBC journalist earning a lot of money.

It’s very common to read sentences that include the words “BBC journalist earning a lot of money” but they’re sentences that usually pivot around the word ‘not’. 

The money bit was laughable but the allegedly alleged alleging of superiority stung more than even the nastier cracks. Am I superior? I have this thing that if I know something, I just assume you do too and that you also knew it long before me. I don’t quite understand how I can then equally find out something and run, run, run to tell you, run like an excited puppy. I think that can be quite irritating of me. Also, I can’t stop myself opening automatic doors with magic. I wave my hand to slide them open in the distance. Or if my hands are full, I’ve been known to blow on them. It is irksome, I know. But the doors always open.

Nearly always.

Anyway. My name is briefly mud in the BBC IT department for encouraging this spam-filter-breaking business. Don’t ever mess with BBC IT.

Except.

BBC IT turns out to be a group of purring pussycats next to the BBC payroll department.

It’s not been on for a few years now but there was a hit show called Lark Rise to Candleford and it was created by Bill Gallagher. During its run, every year when its new series would start airing, I’d get phone calls from people asking to work on it. I’d point out that it was on now, it was airing tonight, they filmed the summer bits back when it was summer, but still they’d come to me for recruitment. BBC payroll wasn’t amused.

Then it was seriously ticked off at me because there was an expense claim for a really big lunch at somewhere like the Ritz. To this day I don’t understand a single pixel of this because while Lark Rise was a BBC show, Bill Gallagher doesn’t work for the BBC. I don’t know how they got any kind of any sort of expense claim and actually I don’t think they did either, but they’d got it and they wanted me to justify it. Since I couldn’t, this dragged on. It dragged on over the end of a financial year.

Wow.

Never mess with BBC payroll.

Except.

It turns out that BBC payroll is a group of purring pussycats next to BBC Human Resources.

Apparently – and again, not a pixel of a clue about what caused this – there was someone working on the show as a freelancer and she’d been there too long. She’d crossed some BBC timescale line thing and now I had to make the decision over whether to let her go or whether to put her on staff. I can see me walking across a BBC Worldwide open plan office floor, having a chat about drama personnel with the BBC and wishing this was in any way really something to do with me and a hit show of my own.

I never found out what happened to her. I always meant to watch the show to see if she carried on in the credits.

All I know is that eventually BBC HR stopped calling me about it and that should’ve been the end of it. I admit that it is a little bit scary having BBC IT, payroll and HR glaring at you but ultimately I suppose it all works out and they’re all fine people.

Shortly afterwards I was made redundant from the BBC.

Do you know, it is only now, here, talking to you, that I have to wonder: was it me who was made redundant or was it another William Gallagher? 

Bugger.

But putting that aside, and forgetting the police at the place of education, the most you can really say about this torrent of William Gallaghers is that it was a torrent. Nothing was really all that bad, I think, and certainly I’m sure we’ve all had mis-addressed emails and calls. (Oh! God in heaven, a memory just slapped back into my head: working at a magazine and getting a voicemail that said “I know where you work, I know what you’ve been doing with my wife, I’m going to be outside your office tonight with a knife”. I have no idea who he was, who she was, and I don’t know what happened with the knife because I only got the message two days later. We did tell the police, just in case, but they only said “Oh, yes, are you the William Gallagher from that place of education or did you write Wonderwall?”)

The torrent is the problem. It’s happened three times in the last ten days, for instance. Unusually, all three people apologised and also said thanks for putting them right. That’s rare. That’s really, really rare. Before them, the one person who thanked me – curiously enough – was Lark Rise’s Bill Gallagher. 

Someone did email me once asking me to write a report about car emissions and some opportunity for new sales in the Middle East. I emailed back saying “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong guy” and I did get the loveliest reply. “No, no!” it said, “Of course you’re the right guy for the job! You can do it, William! Remember when we did that thing in Thailand? It’ll be just like that! Go us!”

They went silent after that. Oddly, everything went quiet for a bit then, I began to miss it. Until the invitations to Dr William Gallagher started to come in. Twice a year now. They ask if I can fit their medical conference into my very busy schedule and I write back and they ignore me and invite me again. This guy must be really good because they’ve now invited him seven times and he never goes.

But apart from that, it got quiet. Lark Rise had finished, for one thing.

Or so I thought.

I’ve had some nasty emails in my time. I’ve had some complaints. I’ve had some bad reviews. But the most deliciously bad one was an email from a woman who sounded like she was in her seventies. If I read you everything she said, you would picture her having written it in green ink on parchment rather than email. 

It was about Lark Rise to Candleford, she’d just seen it on DVD and she was spitting mad. It was one of those that begins “Mr Gallagher” and is full of bile. How dare I insult the world with this appalling drama? 

She had very specific criticisms. Lark Rise was a period piece. Gentle, Sunday-night BBC television drama, light and frothy, set back when it was always beautiful summer. It was fantasy. But that wasn’t good enough, apparently. “You’ve made the people look like fools!” They were fictional yet I was lambasted in this email for sullying the reputation of “the past lives of people in England”. 

She told me that it was obvious I didn’t do my homework researching the reality of this time. And – I have only ever seen this done as a joke before but she said it completely seriously: she signed off the email saying “Good day to you, sir!”

I replied. “Well, there’s irony for you. If you’d done your research and read all two of his names on screen, you’d know that Lark Rise was by *Bill* Gallagher. I didn’t write the show and, for future reference, I’m also not responsible for Wonderwall.”

“Wikipedia says you did!”

No, it doesn’t. 

“Well, can you pass it on to the right people then?”

I don’t quite know why she thought one William Gallagher must know all the others, unless she’d heard of the CompuServe group, but as it happens, yes, I could have passed it on to him. I didn’t.

And I realise now that this was a turning point for me. That email and this moment, talking to you, telling you all about it.

Remembering the place of education, the police, the IT, the payroll, the HR, the redundancy. And all the knife voicemail. Plus all the voicemails that go “William! I’m at Glasgow train station, can you pick me up?” Or the Skype message that went “I’m just getting on the plane now but when I’m in Boston, can we have lunch?”

I go a long way to help people find their real William Gallaghers and usually it’s ignored, rarely it’s thanked, once or twice I have been ripped to pieces for apparently pretending to be their William Gallagher.

So I’ve made this decision. 

No more.

No more stopping a meeting to reply to someone about this and putting them right, putting them in touch with the guy they want. 

If they’re not going to listen to me when I help them, I’m just.. going… to… say… yes.

Yes.

I’m William Gallagher.

Well, I am, aren’t I?

So a week on Thursday, I have a lunch meeting in Boston where I am going to discuss high heels.

On February 17, 2014, I will be in the Johnson Suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Giving a talk about stem cell research. In Shanghai.

And today I’ve taken over some fella’s blog.

Last night I ran a workshop on productivity for creative writers and one woman in the session spoke of how she used to do a Have Done kind of list because a To Do one was too daunting. So she’d do her tasks and then write them down when they were completed: it didn’t help her manage the work but that’s not why she did it. She did it because at the end of the day or the week or whatever, she had this list of what she’d done.

You know how good that kind of list would make you feel. And I also think that we let things go too easily, especially when we have a lot on. We don’t stop to make a note and instead we reach the end of the month or the year and aren’t entirely sure where it all went and what in the world we did.

So I like her idea a lot.  I’m having that.

Which means… listen, this is going to be a three-biscuit kind of chat.

Two weeks ago now, I wrote a blog about the 1970s/80s TV show Lou Grant and specifically how it is because of the writers and producers of this – and I named them – that I became a writer. Since then, two of the people I named have got in touch. April Smith and Seth Freeman. Names I know so well that I can picture the font used for them on the show back then, they are now names in my email inbox.

I told one of them: if I’d known back then that you would ever email me, I’d have written the blog sooner.

You write something here, just a small something, and it reaches out across the world. I know that’s obvious, I know you know that, but it makes me blink. I like that you and I get to talk, I don’t usually pay a lot of mind or attention to how many others are earwigging our chat. (Except when they drink all the tea.) But I admit I did look at the statistics over the Lou Grant post and they were more, there were considerably more people reading us for that one than usual.

For the whole week until the next Self Distract, the numbers kept going on up and I love that maybe, just possibly maybe, people who had not heard of Lou Grant might now find it.

But that was me writing about someone else’s show and the following week, last Friday now, I instead wrote about me and my book that had just come out: The Blank Screen – Productivity for Creative Writers. More people read that blog in the first day than Lou Grant got in the week.

You wrecked my productivity, mind. I’d intended to spend the whole day on a particular project and instead I nattered and blathered and yapped over Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and old-fashioned email. Got into such gorgeous chats, I didn’t want to go back to work. People saying hang on a sec, popping off to buy the book, and then coming back to continue the chat. (Which reminds me, I said somewhere that the iBooks version would be out soon and it is now: buy The Blank Screen on iBooks.)

For completeness, the Kindle one is here in the UK and there on Kindle in America while the gorgeous paperback is on these Amazon UK shelves and those Amazon American ones.

What I was supposed to be doing instead of nattering, by the way, was prepping for a Writing Squad that ran last Saturday. Do you know any kids aged 8 to 12-or-so who live in Burton on Trent? Nine are on this monthly Writing Squad now but there is room for maybe two or three more. If you know or indeed have school-age children anywhere in the West Midlands, there are Writing Squads all over the place. Have a look here at Writing West Midlands’ page about it all.

I had a blast that day. We all did, I think: myself, the kids and my assistant writer Justina Hart. I put a bag in the middle of the table and we discussed what might be in it. We wrote stories about what might be in it. And then the bag spoke. I’d hidden a bluetooth loudspeaker in it and cued a recording of me pleading to be let out. One kind child pointed out that there couldn’t be any air in the bag so I unzipped a corner – and yelped as this thing bit me.

“It’s a pixie!” Apparently pixies bite where fairies don’t. I did not know this. I love knowing this now. I love that these kids have this imagination and that they get to express it in writing. I wish there had been anything like the Writing Squads when I was a child.

If there had been, I’d have been writing professionally much earlier. Not that I do so much writing at the moment: once I left that Writing Squad on Saturday, I had to prepare for a spot talking at the Best of Tell Me on a Sunday.

Storyteller Cat Weatherill runs a regular series of events called Tell Me on a Sunday in which half a dozen or so speakers recount a tale. Usually there’s a theme, always the stories have to be true. I’d say that one of the best things that’s happened to me this year is to be invited to speak at one of these, then another of the best things is to be invited back, another is for that invitation to be to a Best of Tell Me on a Sunday event – and another best is that this time I got to speak first. So I could relax then and fully enjoy the rest of the storytellers. Very proud to have been on the same bill as them.

Tell Me on a Sunday returns for another run in January: keep an eye on Cat’s website, on the venue Ikon Gallery’s one or have a gander at the Facebook page for this month’s special.

Something else that was special about this one is that it was run specifically as part of the Birmingham Literature Festival. Me in a Birmingham Literature Festival.

Do you know the only thing better than being in the Birmingham Literature Festival?

It’s being in it twice.

You’ll never guess what night Tell Me on a Sunday was but then last night, Thursday 10 October, I did this workshop version of The Blank Screen. You’d have to ask the sell-out capacity crowd – oh, I so liked saying that to you, do you mind if I say it again? You’d have to ask the sell-out capacity crowd what they thought of it but they were great and I came away hoarse, croaking and happy after three hours or so of chatting.

I’m whacked today, though. And all of this stuff skips that I was filmed for a project on Tuesday – can’t tell you what, sorry – and that Angela and I were at a particularly good theatre discussion on Wednesday. That I finally got to have the most glorious hot chocolate at the pink-and-white-spotted Ruby Ru choccie shop in Moseley. That there’s more theatre tonight. And that The Blank Screen nattering has continued akimbo.

All of this has been in the works for a long time. Even the spontaneous hot chocolate drinking. So I’ve been looking forward to the week for months, I’ve been a bit scared of the week for months – much as I now relish presenting and speaking on stage I still get sick with nerves right up until the moment it starts – and it’s all been a candy mountain ahead of me.

I’ve a tickle of a memory in my head about an Alan Plater drama. I think it was one of his. I remember it having a notion – whatever the drama was, I remember it including the story of how someone like aborigine travellers would sometimes just stop. They’d sit down during some incredible migratory journey. And when asked why, they’d apparently explain that they’d walked so far, they needed time for their souls to catch up.

I like that. I’m going to give my soul another few minutes and an extra mug of tea.

Not sure what to do next.

But I am glad for this idea of taking a moment to write it down instead of just rushing on into the next crisis.

And you’ve listened very patiently, thank you. Here: I also bought some dark chocolate mints from Ruby Ru, you’ve earned one.

Wait. Shouldn’t it be get on your backside? I hear of these writers who work standing up and I’ve even been hearing of ones who write at a stand-up desk while walking on a treadmill. I need to sit down.

Listen, so far this year I’ve written more than a quarter of a million words and they’ve all been published or are in the process of being published. I’m obviously a bit pleased with that because I can’t measure quality but I can feel the width. But in the middle of the very busiest point, I had an idea.

Saturday 25 May. I’m on the bus going over to see my mother. Slightly bleary, slightly dazed: I’m writing the biggest and most complex book I’ve ever done and I’ve just been doing a long Doctor Who script and a short Birmingham Rep one. I was noodling on how I wouldn’t have been able to do that before. Creatively, it was all new to me and I was reaching into new areas. But also just physically managing the volume of it all: that was new too. And I realised that there are things I’ve learnt about writing to deadlines and slicing your time up that had made this hectic time possible. Conceivable.

They’d also made it quite fun. Still daunting, but fun. I don’t think I would’ve been capable of enjoying it a few years ago.

“That’s a good idea for a book,” I thought.

“Pardon?” said a woman sitting next to me.

“There are so many books about creative writing,” I said. “Somebody should write one about doing it all productively, about the business of writing and of how to get things done without collapsing. Something about when you sit down at that glowing blank screen and don’t know what to write next or are having to clutch your chest with anxiety about a deadline.”

“I think this is my stop,” she said.

It is a good idea. I’d buy that book. I mean, obviously I couldn’t write it, I was far too busy.

But I did have my iPad with me on the bus.

So I wrote 1,000 words about the idea.

When I started writing there, it was meant to be a kind of prose sketch of the idea: a piece about what the book would be about, a piece that tested for me whether there was enough here to do a book. When I had reached my mother’s place, I’d ended up with a book introduction. I emailed the text to Angela and a wee while later, she emailed back saying she loved it but I did have a typo on line three. Praise, encouragement and an eagle eye. Fantastic.

Obviously I couldn’t write the book, I was far too busy.

Besides, if you’re going to write about being productive, I think you have to be productive. You’re rather beholden to that. You have to get on with it.

So.

Ninety-six days later, I had a proof paperback copy in my hands. “The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers”.

BBC journalist, Doctor Who radio writer and book author William Gallagher shows you how to make the very most of your limited creative time. Find out when you write best – and when you really don’t – plus how to remove many distractions and minimise all of them.

Learn how to get started when it’s the last thing you want to do but the deadlines won’t wait.

Turn email back into a genuine writer’s tool, make phone calls a little easier and a lot more useful. Make your To Do list something you enjoy instead of always avoid. See how to stay the creative writer you are yet also become the efficient person everyone turns to.

Includes how to get more out of your computer and your kettle.

Charlie Jordan, who’s interviewed me on BBC Radio and is a former Birmingham Poet Laureate whose work has choked me up , says:

“It has inspired me to look at my methods of writing more, and inspired me to attempt a few more ‘morning pages’ before the rest of the house wake up.”

Journalist, scriptwriter, novelist and blogger Jason Arnopp – he could write a bit more, couldn’t he? – proofread a copy, gave me loads of clever notes and concluded that the book has a lot of useful advice but:

“Jesus. I wonder if, at some point, you should somehow acknowledge that you are a DYNAMO and that most people don’t work this hard?  Maybe even shouldn’t!”

I have wanted to tell you about this book since about Sunday 26 May and actually I have leaked a few choice bits in blogs since then.

But I finally get to tell you about it properly today.

Because today “The Blank Screen” book goes on sale at the Birmingham Literature Festival.

I read the book now and it is like seeing the contents of my head on paper. Everything I do – everything I do that works, anyway – written out there in bouncy text. So my head is on sale at the most tremendous festival which is being held in my hometown and right at the new Library of Birmingham.

I’m going to try pausing the work for today to just enjoy this.

I’ll try, anyway.

If you can’t afford to stop working today, if you’re having a really pressing, anxious writing day, let me help you. Here’s a free PDF copy of The Blank Screen’s key chapter on Bad Days. I hope you like it.

And if you do, the book is also available away from the festival: it’s in paperback on Amazon UK and Amazon US, it’s on Kindle for UK and US. It’s actually available worldwide and an iBooks version is coming soon. I expect I’ll babble at you here when that comes out but you’ll definitely learn of it on the new website, theblankscreen.co.uk.

From my head and Birmingham’s Number 1 bus to the rest of the world. How does that happen? And what do I do next?

I’m not sure you need to know this but I need to tell you. I realised recently, and instantly mentioned to you, that writing is an illness. But if it is, then you’re supposed to catch the bug from Shakespeare or Larkin or Dickinson or Dickens.

I got it from Gene Reynolds, Leon Tokatyan, April Smith, Robert Schlitt, Michelle Gallery, Seth Freeman, Allan Burns and James L Brooks. You may not know the names but not one of them knows mine either.

Not true.

April Smith is now a crime novelist and we exchanged emails a few years ago. So at one point, yes, one of those names had heard of me but by now she’ll have forgotten. So it stands: not one of those people knows a pixel about me and yet, in combination, they got me writing.

Because they made Lou Grant. They wrote and produced my favourite show.

Lou Grant aired from 1977 to 1982; I don’t want to work out how young I was then but I was pretty young.

It’s a funny thing but today the show isn’t well known at all yet when it was cancelled, there was controversy. I mean, controversy. There was a march. People marched on the studio demanding its return. I’ve seen photos.

Its cancellation was so controversial that its star Ed Asner was blamed – he’d become a political and union figure in real life – and its star Ed Asner paid the price of not working for years afterwards. How much of that was politics, how much of it was that he was so well known in this one role that it was hard to see him in another, I don’t know.

Lou Grant was a journalism drama and I became a journalist, but that’s not how it worked. I didn’t become a journalist because of this show, I became a writer. Because it was the first time I’d watched a TV show and become conscious that it was a crafted piece of work. That effort and skill and talent had gone into it. That it mattered. It wasn’t just an hour’s entertainment to half-watch at the end of the day, it was an hour’s drama that took work to make.

From that moment on, the one-hour TV drama became to me what the three-minute pop song is to so many others. I love the form and its constraints and what can be done, what is done, in that time. That shrinking time: Lou Grant’s ‘one-hour’ episodes run 50 or even 52 minutes where something like today’s Leverage ‘one-hour’ is 43.

I also got into the history of this dramatic form and Lou Grant is special there too: it was the first and to this day remains the only hour drama to have come out of a half-hour sitcom. If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, think about it again: a supporting character in the comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show became the lead in a drama. Look at how the character of Lewis changed when he was promoted to the lead of his own show after Morse changed and he was staying in drama. Look at how Frasier Crane changed when he went from Cheers to his own show Frasier – and he was staying in comedy.

Lou Grant and the actor Ed Asner had to change and to bring us along from a four-camera brightly-lit sitcom which, as very good as it was, had its chief aim of being to make you laugh at least twice a minute for half an hour. And we had to be brought to the same character now in a very naturalistic, single-camera one-hour drama that intended – and succeeded – in exploring serious areas. Very serious areas. They seemed easier to me because I’m in the UK and they were primarily American issues so I didn’t have the context and the grounding that its main intended audience had, but they had it.

As a writer looking back at it now, I can see that I was fascinated by how little happens. It’s a bit Alan Plater-like in that respect because despite being a 1970s/80s primetime US hit, every episode really boils down to people in rooms talking. It was a technically very clever show in how it managed to keep finding new and seemingly fresh ways to have a reporter interview someone in a room but more than that, it made you forget that this is all you were getting.

I love the Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) and actor/writer Julie Delpy has said in interviews that the hardest thing about the talky scenes in that is to make them be dramatic enough to not be boring yet not so dramatic that they are unrealistic. Lou Grant did this all the time.

It was also an ensemble piece with many major characters all able to lead an episode. It did that before Hill Street Blues – which was made by the same company – and it even did Hill Street’s trademark handheld camerawork. It only did that for one episode but it was deeply more effective, I think, for that: we were so used to the smooth and fluid dolly-track-driven camerawork of most episodes that to see one done handheld was jolting.

So I began being aware of the technical side of television too. Lou Grant got me because of its writing, then it got me seeing television as an industry, then it got me appreciating the technical craft of production done well and finally it got me appreciating actors who were able to handle long, involved scenes without the aid of car chases and explosions.

It got me into technology, too, as video had just come out and I was watching those episodes on VHS over and over. Lou Grant was supremely fortunate to be about the newspaper industry just as it was going through what then seemed its big change. It’s gone through the internet since but in the 1970s and 1980s, we would see scenes in Compositing: a huge room where strips of paper were physically cut and pasted together. No Cmd-C, Cmd-V, actual scissors and actual glue. And then we’d see how quickly and radically that changed as the fictional Los Angeles Tribune newspaper switched to computers.

Oh, and the show got me into soundtrack music too because Patrick Williams’s theme was re-recorded each season and I noticed it because I’d know the previous run’s tune so well.

So maybe it’s no wonder when I first went to Los Angeles, about ten years ago now, I got to see the Gene Reynolds Collection at UCLA. The scripts for that show I loved so much, the production memoes, the day to day makings of it. Heaven. I also went down the road to the real-life Los Angeles Times and got a smidgeon’s worth of work out of them. The Times wasn’t the inspiration for the more rundown Trib but it was a huge resource and it was a big presence in the show because the real paper was presented as the fictional one’s rival.

I tell you this now because I’ve just been back to Los Angeles. I didn’t get any work, I didn’t look for any work – I brought work with me, let’s not be daft – but this was a holiday. And still I had to go to Pershing Square.

Lou Grant was filmed over at CBS Studios, that’s where people marched in the early 1980s, but the exterior of the Trib was filmed at Pershing Square. It’s actually an ordinary office block and they popped a Trib sign over one for a pharmacy on the corner, but that’s the building that sticks in my mind all these years.

And it’s the building I had to go to. I said so many people have their three-minute pop song obsession and I have my one-hour television one. They have their Abbey Road, I have my Pershing Square.

And here I am, pointing at the real place and its fifth floor, where the Trib’s City Room was supposedly set and where I spent my formative television-viewing years.

There. Had to tell you all that. How have you been?

William

Writer: Doctor Who audios, British Film Institute: The Beiderbecke Affair, The Blank Screen
www.williamgallagher.com

It’s 9pm on Alcatraz. My head hasn’t adjusted to the time zone yet so in my mind it’s 5am and I should be getting to work. But I always slack off on Fridays to have a natter with you. And, besides, they’ve just clanged shut door after door.

“Are there any of you left in here?” said a guard – sorry, presumably a tour guide but he deliberately sounds like a guard just now. Especially as we’re outside in the cold and have that silly but palpable worry that the boat has gone.

I have to touch things before they’re real. Are you like that? I had to hold a cell door before I knew what it was like, before I knew I was here. A few years ago I had to break the rules, lean over the ropes and touch the hull of the Titanic. Had to.

It’s surely why I like meeting you and shaking your hand. It’s certainly why I like typing: it’s me touching the words I write.

Earlier today I was on a helicopter tour – a sad aside: I’ve now spent longer in helicopters as a tourist than as an impoverished would-be pilot – and we flew under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a marvellous moment but I swear it wouldn’t have been so rich if I hadn’t walked the bridge yesterday. Touched it yesterday.

Which may be why I have problems with holidays. Can’t touch them. I want to quote MC Hammer and say can’t touch this but I can’t remember who that is and can’t look up Wikipedia because there is no wifi on Alcatraz. Hard labour, harsh cells, screaming winds and no wifi. The poor bastards.

Whoever MC Hammer is, I bet he or she is better with holidays than I am.

I have managed to get two jobs to do while I’m away, so that helps.

And I have turned to theft: I’ve stolen this whole ‘Postcard from…’ blog format from a pal, Katharine D’Souza, who regularly writes such things here.

Back to Alcatraz where I’ve just met a fella who can’t understand why anyone would come to the West Coast and another Cliff Clavin type who wanted to tell me more about Birmingham than I already knew.

Neither of them had any work for me. But both of them got us onto the last boat. Somebody really should organise overnight stays at Alcatraz but I’ve done my time.

A producer once told me that the most important thing in drama is the setting. I lied my agreement, as I wanted to work with her, but I knew the truth: drama is character. I happen to believe that dialogue is character, but we’re talking people, not places.

Only…

Well, I’m still not persuaded. And while she was talking about television drama in general, the conversation was dipping mostly into soaps. It’s funny that I can remember this part of the conversation so well yet I can’t fathom how we got onto it, but the topic included how a soap needs to provide a setting that very many characters can thrive in. And specifically a setting that can outlast its characters. I can see that. I can see that more than this maxim that setting is always more important than character or anything else.

Yet I’m pondering it. This is like sales: if you can get the customer to consider the product, you’re halfway there. If you can just get them to say yes or engage in the conversation, you’ve got them. It’s why all those tedious cold calls begin with “Hello, how are you today?” (I’m okay with that. I tend to say that I’m good, thank you, and then ask them how they are. Nine times out of ten, that throws them completely. One in the ten will reply and I’ll carry on listening. The rest will lurch on to the next line of the script, and I won’t. Actually, just to carry this aside way off, I’ve had a right spate of cold callers coming to my door lately. These ones always begin with “Don’t worry, I’m not selling anything.” To which the only reply is: “Goodbye, then.”)

Where were we?

I’m pondering. Thanks.

The reason I should really ponder is because it happens to be true that each time I’ve found a particular setting for a Doctor Who story, the idea, the pitch, the treatment and then even eventually the script have flown far and fast and I think quite high.

But I’m actually pondering because of Deep Space Nine.

I’m going away on holiday shortly and intend to stock up my iPad with some reading so I checked out the Kindle and iBooks stores. (If you don’t know, you can read Kindle books on iPad. And the Kindle Store has more books than Apple’s own iBooks Store. But the iBooks application on iPad is sufficiently more pleasant to read that I buy more from there than I do Amazon. The differences are small and decreasing over time, but they’re still there. The iBooks application has better typography, to my mind, and it matters.)

Deep Space Nine.

This was a Star Trek television series many years ago and now it is a long, unending series of Star Trek novels. I like Star Trek novels: I think they work better than the TV shows and over the years I have particularly enjoyed many linked DS9 novels. Not enough that I read all of them, but plenty enough that I look out for ones I fancy.

And it turns out that there is a new Star Trek book whose description begins:

WELCOME TO THE NEW DEEP SPACE 9

After the destruction of the original space station by a rogue faction of the Typhon Pact –

– what? Destruction of what?

The fictional station Deep Space Nine has been destroyed and my first thought was that they can’t do that, I lived there.

And then just to make certain I pondered setting, this week saw the opening of the new Library of Birmingham. I was already excited by this: I gabbled at you about it not long ago. But now going there, it was… overwhelming. Everybody had cameras and was photographing this rather extraordinarily marvellous new building yet I couldn’t. Needed to see it without a lens in front of me. Needed to absorb it, somehow.

You know and I know that sometime quite soon, we’re going to be used to the new library. I do want to know my way around it, I do want to work there, but I love how just at the moment, just at this moment, it is a barrage, a torrent of options and possibilities.

And it is so exciting to see people being so excited about a library.

I bubbled at one of the staff who bubbled right back: she’s been working on the library project for five years. Can you imagine how she must feel now it’s done?

Well, okay, yes, you’re a cynic. She feels unemployed. But apart from that.

She showed me the room I’m going to be doing a workshop in. (And that reminds me, I am delighted to say that tickets are selling briskly but now I’ve seen the room I also have to tell you to get a move on as it’s going to be a quite contained small event. A workshop on The Blank Screen or rather how to fill it, how to get on with writing. Have a look at the official brochure listing for the Birmingham Literature Festival. But, unofficially, a colleague just described it as being “about getting off your arse and writing”. I like that. That’s a poster quote, that is. I’m not 100% sure he’d like having that used or I’d tell you his name, but he’s a smart guy. We’ll leave it at that.)

I went back a day later to explore more, to finally take some photographs – and to join Angela at the newly reopened Birmingham Rep to see a play. The Rep’s been closed for years while all of this has been going on so it is fantastic to be able to go back inside.

Into that gorgeous setting.

For many years I used to have this gig I particularly relished. I wrote a thing called On This Day in Radio Times magazine: in with the listings for each morning in the week, I’d have a little spot to write about broadcasting history. It was filler – literally. The pages had to have a spot where regional differences in TV schedules would be listed and only some Radio Times regions had those. Everyone else got On This Day.

It was bliss.

I can’t remember what I was paid now but, always the professional, I worked out how long it meant I should spend on the job each week – and then completely ignored that. Always and forever, I’d spend vastly too much time on it and sometimes I would just go off on one having a blast researching old issues of Radio Times for the fun of it.

But I used to do this in Birmingham Central Library. It was for a few years, too, so while I knew the library before then, I really do now. I can close my eyes and take a little trip through every nook and cranny.

One day around March 2007, though, I was deep into the job and was reading features published in Radio Times on this day decades before. Actually, precisely 49 years before. I was writing copy that would be published in April 2007 and I devoted the entry to a show called My Word! which was airing in April 1958. It was a quiz show, very popular in its day but not especially remembered now. Yet it gave me a shiver and I quoted the start of the feature in On This Day:

“Drop in at Birmingham Reference Library almost any Friday and you will see a thick-set, bearded man poring over dictionaries and volumes of poetry.”

Flash forward fifty years, substitute Radio Times for the poetry, shed the beard and a few pounds please, and some traditions continue: Birmingham Central Library’s cherished collection of RT is pored over by me for On This Day.

In 1958, though, the man was Edward J Mason, who devised the radio show My Word!, “a cross between a quiz and a riot” which began a new series tonight on the BBC Home service.

I wrote that in RT and I blogged about it here at the time because it gave me a good shiver. A nice one.The kind of shiver when you realise what you’ve just done. Because as I sat there on the fourth floor of Birmingham Central Library, I registered those words and I actually looked up. I looked up from my desk over to where Edward J Mason said he was sitting.

Not only wasn’t he there but nor was the seat. Or the desk. Or, in fact, the library. Because the whole library had moved in the 1970s and that’s why I’m telling you about this again today. Because the whole library is moving once more.

As of next week, the new Library of Birmingham opens and as much as I will miss the old one, there is a real thrill in the city. I have a meeting on Monday night and a colleague just sent his apologies: he’s going to the opening event. I am green.

When I had this shiver back in 2007, it was to do with my being part of a long tradition. The idea that, sure, my work that matters so much to me won’t matter a pixel to anyone when I’m gone but maybe there’ll be someone else researching in the Library of Birmingham and coming across something I’d written. It’d be a message just between the two of us and I’d like to think that if it can’t be useful or interesting, at least it’ll say hello.

But the shiver I get today in 2013 is anticipation.

For not only is the new Library of Birmingham finally opening, but the Birmingham Rep is being recalled to life after years tucked away in various venues. The two are bonded together now and I expect to spend a considerable amount of time in these twin, bonded buildings in the very near future.

The really near future. Really near.

Because I’m booked to present at an event there.

On October 10, 2013, I will be presenting The Blank Screen: a workshop on productivity for creative writers. It’s 18:00-20:30 in Room 103, Library of Birmingham and is part of the Birmingham Literary Festival. (Have a look here for details. It’s presented in association with the Writers’ Guild, it’s £28 or £23 concessions. Bring pen and paper, okay? Not for notes. I’ve written a book just to save you needing to take notes. But you’re going to work.)

We have a new library. And as much as I deeply loved the old one, that was where I used to do research for other people and by chance of when it’s come, the new library is when I’ve moved on to doing more work for myself. My own research, my own books, my own yapping with you. I’m ready for the new place.

Yet I will miss the old one and I hope that I’ll continue to imagine the long history of Birmingham writers all somehow breathing anew in the space.

But Room 103, eh? I don’t know the room yet. Haven’t a clue about it. I don’t know the building yet. But I will.

Damn right I will.

Fantastic.

I’m trying to remember the last time a character died in a drama and didn’t come back to life. This isn’t a new thing – nuts, nuts, nuts, I’ve got the name of the first time it happened. It’s on the tip of my tongue but, Jesus Christ, I can’t recall.

But anyway, I think it’s happening in dramas more now. Certainly I’m loathing it more.

It’s not as if I like a good bloodbath. If something is more violent than my regular benchmark movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, then I’m not automatically drawn to it. I’m not automatically against it, I’m not recoiling in fear the way I am with even the mildest horror story, but I don’t think cor, I must see that.

It’s not even as if I’m against a happy ending necessarily or that there isn’t a part of my head that knows Captain Kirk will always survive whatever the latest life-or-death crisis is.

But now I don’t just know in my heart of hearts that Kirk will survive, I know in my fact of facts that he can’t die. Cannot. Nobody can ever be killed again in Star Trek because that was all fixed in the latest film. No more dying.

Therefore no jeopardy.

The only interesting thing now for me is seeing how they cope when one of the cast doesn’t want to come back for another sequel.

Writers tell other writers that they must kill their darlings: you must be willing to delete your absolute favourite bits of the book or the script if that will be better for the whole. But we don’t listen any more. Or maybe it’s producers who think that’s a stupid idea: you’ve got this character who everyone loves, everyone is riveted to, why wouldn’t you bring him or her back to life so we can keep on enjoying them?

Because sooner or later, we stop enjoying them and it’s over. Forever. We stop enjoying them and we stop watching the show.

Example. A bit of an odd example, but here goes. One of the few times I’ve watched Coronation Street was when there was a big court case legal story and the kick was that we knew the person on trial was innocent. The nation watched. I watched.

And today I can’t tell you which character or what the story was because I switched off and have never gone back.

Because in the week of the big reveal, the big climax to the story, the producers were quoted in newspapers as saying that they would never let an injustice happen in the show. They would never allow an innocent to be convicted.

I do think it was the absolutely most stupid time to tell us that. But, more, it erased Corrie for me. Not just this particular story that I’d been enjoying, but all stories. Ever. I want to say that phrase from Down the Line: “What is point Corrie?”

There is now no story in Corrie that won’t work out happily. True, it was never very likely but now it’s official. I get very tense in romcoms even though they always end well because there is always a pixel of a possibility that they won’t. I give you Lost in Translation. Er. That’s about it.

So it’s not much of a pixel of a chance of a sad ending. Oh! One Day. There you go.

I will watch and enjoy a series where I know everyone will at least scrape by to next week. I’ve written Doctor Who and there’s not a moment’s doubt that’s the Doctor will prevail. But I don’t kill him and bring him back.

Actually, I did one where a character survives. Originally I had planned for her to die but it was honestly too upsetting. Not for me. But it wasn’t going to get made if it were that bleak. And I like the compromise we made, I like where we went instead of her dying. I liked very much what new possibilities it have us in the characters if she didn’t die.

But if she had died, she’d have stayed dead. I promise.

I’m fine with: have they died or haven’t they? I’m not fine with dying and then coming back. Not even when I’m glad about it. Not even when I loved the character and it is bliss to see them sitting up, coming through the door or stepping out of a shower.

Because all they had and all they were died with them. A reborn character is a new character and we’re starting again. We’re starting again with a character who has had the most almightily improbable beginning. When you care enough about a character, it’s as if they are real. If they come back from the dead, there is now zero reality to them.

I didn’t want them to go yet now they have to prove their worth to me anew and they have to get me back to seeing them as real. And it doesn’t happen.

It’s not like you have to kill characters off. But if you want us engaged, if you want us caring at all, let them die.

Okay, here’s a thing. It’s 5am and I’m at my desk. I know that I will spend at least the next twelve hours here, possibly fifteen. I will make myself take a lunch break, but the odds are that I’ll spend it eating right where I am, watching or reading something on this Mac. There will also be many, many and indeed yes thrice many tea breaks. But I’ll bet money that while I’m boiling the kettle, I’ll be reading a book or looking up news on my phone.

So every moment of the day will look ridiculously identical. I told my mother yesterday that I’d passed a certain significant word count on a project and she asked if I’d had to press the buttons on my keyboard all that number of times. Yes, I said. “And the rest,” I thought, as I decided not to tell her that I’d written and thrown away about as much again. It was rather a lot of words and she was thinking about RSI, but there was also this element that from her perspective, the job was sitting on this chair, pressing these buttons and that’s all.

That is about all. And saying this to you now, I can see why she didn’t exactly rush to start writing herself. I can see why this work might not appeal to you if you long to spend your days outside in the sun.

But from here, from this perspective, from my perspective, I’m not going to be looking at a screen at all. I’m not going to be typing all day. I’m certainly not going to be using a computer. Instead, I’m going to be writing a really difficult section of a book: my head will be in facts and sources and interviews and transcribing and describing and keeping an eye on whether any of it is libellous. I’m going to be designing a different book this afternoon. Then I’m preparing for a teleseminar I’m giving tomorrow.

And I’m going to be talking to you.

Here I am, there you are, what’s not to enjoy about that?

I just worked this out because I’m curious and it was starting to bug me: today I only have to work on three projects but I will almost certainly use 26 software applications to do it. I’ve already used 9. Each one needed these keys, this screen, but it all feels so different. I didn’t sit down at 5am thinking that I must switch on a computer. I sat down thinking I can’t remember who I am or why I get up this early. Lit up by this rather huge screen, I just spent some time wondering where you were and what my name is.

Tea helped with that.

But even when I was fully caffeined-up and you had finally got out of bed so I didn’t have to keep tiptoeing around, I didn’t think the word ‘computer’. Didn’t consciously think that I must now open Evernote, Safari, Mail, Word, iTunes, InDesign, Muse, Photoshop, 1Password, Transcription, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, iBooks Author, TextEdit, Pages, Preview, Reeder, Numbers and Excel. I just reached for that note I made yesterday, that thing I was going to tell you. I reached for a Suzanne Vega album. I did also grab for my headphones when I remembered that it’s a bit early and I’ve got neighbours. That may be the fastest I move all day.

But while I don’t think of this as using a computer and I sure as all certain hellfire do not think of anything I do as work, I do think a lot about the way my life goes through these 102 keys. I think about their cute QWERTY layout and why we have that, why French writers have AZERTY instead. I think about how Windows has a keyboard shortcut that lets you switch from QWERTY to AZERTY by accident and would then let you switch right back except the new layout means the bloody keys are not where they were and you cannot find the shortcut.

It fascinates me that while I’m looking at this blank screen, my fingers are typing away and all these words appear. It deeply, deeply fascinates me that the moving finger writes and occasionally holds down shift. I love that we have shift keys that no longer shift anything, they don’t physically move the whole keyboard assembly up an inch so that it’s a capital letter that strikes the page. I love that I’m kneading the keys, needing the keys, and in the moment that I pause, I’m unthinkingly pressing Apple-S. How the same key that put the letter S on the screen is, when pressed at the same time as one other key, the way that I save what I’m doing. Maybe I wouldn’t feel all this if I had to hunt-and-peck at the keys to write but I touch-type so it’s like there isn’t a keyboard here at all, there’s just the writing.

Bear with me a sec, I think I might actually be reaching for a philosophical point here.

Life is a keyboard with 102 keys. Cor. Everything we breathe goes through this small, simple life and everything we do looks physically exactly the same from moment to moment. Yet what we do with what we’ve got is infinitely different. And we can do anything we like, so.

As I say, I think about this a lot. I don’t often think about the 12 or 15 hours ahead of me, at least I don’t think of it as 12 or 15 hours and was a bit surprised when I worked it out to tell you. Instead, I think it is a thrill that I’ll get to work on these projects today. I admit that I do also think it’s going to be a bit of a chore doing some other bits like tax returns later, but then it’s terrific that I’ll get back to all this. Today’s a straight writing day, up to about 2pm when I’m going to be using InDesign. But other days I’ll be writing one minute, editing video or audio the next, then reading or watching something. Given that I do little but express how much I enjoy this lark, I’m going to tell you that it is inexpressibly great.

And that life is 102 keys. Official.

Wait.

Call it 103. Because, freakily, that Suzanne Vega album – Songs in Red and Gray – has this very moment finished and I think that means it’s time to go press the key on my kettle. And read some news, obviously.