Doctor Who’s Woodstock

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This Sunday is the 40th anniversary of the Doctor Who weekend at Longleat House. It is every bit our Woodstock because apart from the music, it was ages ago, it was unique, and everybody claims they were there.

I was there. I just forgot that I was.

I would’ve missed the anniversary, too, except that by total chance, I have been rewatching Doctor Who from the start and this week reached the stories from around that time. The stories that were airing when I was 17 and queuing up to enter this April 3-4, 1983 festival. I’m also — slightly less by chance, more as a consequence of the rewatching — reading Richard Molesworth’s account of all of producer John Nathan-Turner’s tenure running the show, including this festival.

This festival where the BBC figured 10,000 to 13,000 people would attend if they were lucky. Instead, apparently 56,000 turned up – and very many were unlucky in that they just couldn’t be let in.

It’s peculiar what four decades worth of distance can do, though. I found a Vimeo video about the event and my heart jumped in recognition – of a sign. Really I think it was at the font the sign was in, but it’s highly possible this BBC banner was just in my face for an extremely long time because a clear memory is of queuing.

Well, it’s a clear memory now, it left my head for forty years. But now it’s come back, yes, I remember that the very last thing I did was to join the line for the autograph session. I want to say that it took four hours to get through the queue, but it may well have been longer. I just recall the line stretching around Longleat House’s garden, and the relief as we got to the end, entered what we thought was the house –

– and found we were in the back garden, with a queue ahead of us that was exactly as long as the one we’ve been in.

I know that I was really queuing because I’d seen everything else, but in as far as I’ve ever been fussed about autographs, I think I wanted to get Sarah Sutton’s. She played Nyssa in the show but by the time I got to her table, she’d left the series.

Okay, she really did leave Doctor Who but she was already out of the show by this time. Only, the event came around the time of The Five Doctors, the 20th anniversary special written by Terrence Dicks. One of the guest cast for that was Carole Ann Ford, who had left about 20 years earlier and was only back for one episode.

Consequently, in a panel discussion, one utter arse from the crowd asked Sarah Sutton whether, given all of this, there was any chance she could leave the show for just one episode and then come back for 20 years.

It got a big laugh, it got quoted in Doctor Who Monthly or Weekly or whatever that was then, and neither I nor anyone else can remember how Sutton managed to bat the question back.

Yes.

I haven’t told anyone it was me who asked, certainly I didn’t tell Sarah Sutton herself when I wrote a Big Finish Doctor Who script featuring her. And you are never going to tell anybody either. Promise me.

Watching that two-hour Vimeo video of the event now, though, I’m feeling better. My question was not filmed, but most of the panel was and at this distance, the producer in me thinks that at least I threw Sutton a bone. It’s a little curious how everyone else on that panel is asked many things yet, at least in the recording, there is almost nothing for Sutton to do or respond to.

No, it doesn’t help. At this distance, on reflection, the utter obviousness that I had a crush on both the character and the actor might be the most squirmingly embarrassing part of the event for me.

At the time, a cold April in 1983, I thought the laughter was with me, not about me, and besides, any way you get a good laugh makes it worthwhile. Plus, back then, I was sure that truly the most embarrassing part came later on when I was standing naked in a ice-cold metal toilet at 3am with the sound of lions roaring just outside.

But, frankly, we’ve all done that at some point.

Compose yourself

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I got a bit excited recently, talking with the musician and film composer Isobel Waller-Bridge. It was just for a few moments at a event, seriously no more than moments, and yet I can’t stop thinking about her work.

Follow. As a writer, I like to believe that a script exists outside of the film or the play that’s made from it, that it is a distinct piece of work where acting, for instance, is obviously inseparable from the production.

So when you hear that a TV show, say, is dreadful but the acting skill of such-and-such a star saved it, that’s just bollocks. I’m not in any way knocking actors, I just know that a performance is the actor performing the script and if it is not on the page, it ain’t ever going to be on the stage.

Without the script, an actor just gets to stand there, so consequently acting cannot ever be separated from a production. I suppose costume design, locations, hair design, these are all things that can have a life away from the production. But they don’t tend to.

And in truth, reluctantly, nor do scripts. You can read them without seeing the show, I do read them, I frankly am incapable of stopping reading them, but I once gave a friend a book of Frasier scripts and she looked at me exactly the way you are right now.

Whereas.

The music lives on.

Music is astoundingly woven into a show, and yet it can fully exist outside it. I relished the 2009 film Coco avant Chanel by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine, for example, but I’ve only seen it the once and yet I’ve listened to the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat countless times.

I’m listening to it now.

That does bring the film back to me, but less as images or frames, more the feel of it and of how I felt at the time, too.

And this is what was on my mind as I quizzed this film composer at an event. Talking with someone who is actually doing this work was fascinating.

I asked her about how late in a production she can be brought in, for instance. Something so crucial as music, something that could be make or break for a show, I’ve heard that it is just about the last thing considered, and yes, apparently it’s true.

I wanted to ask her about the responsibility of writing to deadlines, of writing to other people’s words and images. But I didn’t get that long. I did get to ask about “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”, which she did the music for.

“I can’t remember the running time,” I said. “What was it?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“And how much music did you have to compose?”

“Twenty-eight minutes.”

I laughed because, as she pointed out, there can be entire feature film scores with no more music than that.

Music is something crucial to me, and I know nothing of it. I wonder sometimes if that’s a good thing, as in the way I was looking at Chinese handwriting in a workshop recently and because I don’t understand it, I’m just seeing the sheer beauty of the letterforms.

Still, I want to write something that this composer then works on. I want to soak up how in the world she does it, I want to witness the process. And oh, do I want to sit in on the recording sessions.

Years ago I interviewed various people involved in The Beiderbecke Affair, Alan Plater’s drama, and several of them told me about Alan in the recording studio. Just being there, nothing to do, no requirement for him to be there, but he was and he was being happy.

And right this moment, I am choked up by Coco avant Chanel, track 4, Royallieu.

Disbelief and dat belief

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You’ve heard this before just as often as I have, but earlier this week someone again told me that thing about acting as if you already have the job you want. Fake it till you make it, they said, act and dress and behave as if you are what you want to be, whatever that is.

The argument is that total immersion and a concomitant total self-belief will get you where you long to go.

I can buy the immersion side. I know when I’m with other writers it doesn’t matter how different we are, for instance, we all somehow get it. Whatever it is. There is something fulfilling about that, and if I’m about to mix a metaphor up, let me: a rising tide lifts all boats and does so until the cows come home.

What I can’t get behind is the total self-belief part. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have it, but for some reason this time when it was said to me, I was reminded of every time I’ve heard it.

And I realised that I am never told this by someone who has got where they want to go. Most of the time the person telling me is currently striving toward that, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of good old striving, but there is something wrong with this picture. The person who told me it this week had read it in an autobiography of a man who’d done this self-belief business. Actually, it had worked out for the autobiography guy, so I must be wrong, yet I can ignore that like a man and instead keep coming back to this same thing.

I am never told that self-belief works by someone who has self-belief.

Honestly, I think I prefer people who don’t.

But as well as the person telling me about self-belief being usually so far away from self-belief, maybe what I think I’m seeing is a similar disconnection between describing work and actually doing it.

It’s like the way — you’ve heard this, too — if you spend 10,000 hours on something, you will become good at it, or an expert, or something.

No one, not one single soul, who says that is currently anywhere but at the start of the 10,000 hours. For speed, I just nod and ask them to make sure to look me up when they’re on 9,999.

There isn’t a number of hours. There isn’t a manifestation of success that comes from nothing but total self-belief.

All there is, all there ever is, is the work and the effort and the striving. I have no clue why anyone would want to be any other way.

Mind you, total self-belief. Complete confidence, complete certainty. Oh, it would be good to have that. Just for an hour or two, just once in a while.

Set in my ways

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Forty years ago, an impossible forty years ago, the second season of Cheers began and to this day I remember being disappointed. Admittedly, I only remember it this day because lately I’ve been reading some Cheers scripts and watching the odd episode, but it obviously lodged in my head deeply back then because it came back like it had been waiting, brooding.

Do let me point out, if you don’t happen to already know, that Cheers is an exquisitely written sitcom from the 1980s. The show brought us Ted Danson, it brought us the whole spin-off Frasier. It also brought us Kirstie Alley and Woody Harrelson, but nobody’s perfect.

If you haven’t seen it or don’t know it, have a read of the pilot script, Give Me a Ring Sometime, by Glen and Les Charles. There is a character in it called Mrs Littlefield who was edited out of the final show, but even if her scenes don’t work well, the script is as fine a pilot as you can imagine.

But.

That was 1982 and it’s 1983 that’s on my mind, specifically some time in 1983 when the second season began airing here in the UK and immediately disappointed me.

Not because it wasn’t funny. Certainly not that. Cheers ran for 275 episodes and season 1 accounted for just 22 of those. No question, there are some tremendous episodes in the rest of the run.

But there was also something else. Or rather somewhere else. Quite a few somewhere elses.

Every minute of every one of those first season episodes is set in the Boston bar called Cheers. There is the main bar, there’s back pool room, a corridor between the two which also has the toilets – though we never see those – and an office.

Nothing else. No, wait, the main bar has a door to the outside and through that, and a window, you can see steps leading up from this basement bar to the street level.

But other than that, nothing. Effectively one single set for the entire first season. Since it was really a three-wall studio set, there also wasn’t a giant amount of variation you could have in camera angels. I don’t believe we ever saw the seating areas behind the bar, for instance.

I’m not certain of this now, it’s been such a long time, but I think that the episodes were so well written, so well made, that it did not occur to you that every single edition was effectively a bottle show. But then the second season opens and we’re in the apartment of one of the characters.

That’s when I realised we’d been in one set for a year, that’s when I appreciated just how incredibly hard to do that is, and unfortunately that’s when I was disappointed. Somehow taking us outside the bar didn’t feel like opening up the story, it felt like making the story easier.

When you just have one set, there isn’t a lot to point the camera at. I think Cheers was superbly designed and so scenes were visually well done, but even so, at 22 episodes and 1 set, every thing you could possibly look at was shown a lot.

Then for instance if you need two different conversations to be going on at the same time, you have to contrive a way for them to take place at opposite ends of the bar. You have to conjure up reasons for characters to move between them.

And then the bar was in a basement so there was never any daylight, never any evening time, never the slightest difference in the lighting. So if you need us to know it’s mid-afternoon and Norm is drinking very early, or if you need us to know it’s 2am and he’s still there for “just one more and then I really have to go”, you have to find a way to tell us.

It’s fascinating to me how hard all of this is and how I don’t believe we register that as we watch. Cheers gets a lot of very deserved praise for being funny, but it was so clever, too.

Cheers did the one-set trick best, I think and certainly for the longest time that I know of, but I realise now that I am just generally drawn to confined stories. I’ve been watching Doctor Who, going right back to the start in 1963 and this week finally reaching Peter Davison’s era, and there are many stories where the action is in a single set or just a couple of them.

I get how I can appreciate the difficulty and I get how I can applaud when confined drama or comedy is done well. But I can’t understand why I am so drawn to single-set pieces as a writer as much as a viewer.

Unless it’s because I’m cheap.

More wrongness

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I have never chosen to watch a film or TV show because of the stars in it, but that’s not because I don’t rate actors. I also don’t watch something just because of the director.

Okay, I will watch because of the writer. But even then, it’s not automatic, it’s not enough. I have to be interested, something has to interest me, something has to make me watch.

But in particular, it’s not that I under-appreciate actors. Yet then you get things like the cast of “The Usual Suspects”. This is the thriller with the fantastic twist that means every character you’d got interested in doesn’t matter anymore and you can go home, change channels, stream something else, that’s very clever, we’re done now.

Gabriel Byrne in particular, so good in the series In Treatment, is regularly reported to have said he didn’t know whether his character in The Usual Suspects was the one who is revealed to be the baddie.

In my turn, I have regularly said – mostly to myself, you now stop listening when I grumble – that Bryne and the rest should take another look at the script. Specifically, page 142.

Only, this week I came across an interview on YouTube with John le Carré talking about the BBC version of his Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And in it he describes a conversation he had with its star, Alec Guinness, in which the actor worried aloud about who the baddie was.

Before I could draw breath and say to my TV set that it’s in the bloody script, does no one read this thing, you’ve got one job to do and it starts there on the page, le Carré said “William, no, shut it a minute.”

Well, he might as well have done. What he actually said was how fascinating this conversation was because at that point Alec Guinness knew every word of the scripts — but his character only knew as far as the point they’d got to in filming.

Alec Guinness was able to be a pro who knew everybody’s lines and simultaneously be that much into the character George Smiley, for whom this wasn’t a script, wasn’t a story, it was the character’s real life.

I sit corrected.

I was young

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Oh, come on, I’m a man: yes, it’s taken me 15 years to admit I was stupidly wrong about something, but you know men who will never admit it under any circumstances. Man, wrong, admitting it, that’s a Dear Diary moment for anyone.

Although now I’m clearly just putting this off.

Okay.

Earlier this week I rewatched a 2008 episode of “Doctor Who” called “Midnight”. There was no reason, I just flicked past it in the lists, fancied it, watched it, and afterwards was still so wide-eyed into it that I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t just think, you know, “cor” or something intelligent.

I had to go say so online. Please explain to me why. I know you know because you’ve done it too, you’ve raced to enthuse about something but I’m not sure why we do it. When you’re a professional reviewer, sure, you want people to watch this wonderful thing you’ve just seen, especially if it’s not something they might watch anyway, but –

Oh.

Speaking of being a professional reviewer…

After I’d blathered away about how great this was, I still couldn’t sit still, so I read all I could about the episode online and unfortunately that included Wikipedia. It’s unfortunate because to my utter astonishment, Wikipedia quotes me.

God, it would be wonderful if I opened Wikipedia to see the exact tweet I had just sent about how fantastic “Midnight” is. That would be full-on timey-wimey stuff. Instead, it was part-on timey-wimey, because it was quoting me from 2008 and words I’m sure are mine, but which I cannot recall writing.

“William Gallagher of Radio Times was generally positive about the episode,” says whoever edits Wikipedia, “but he said he would have ‘liked just a beat’ more, just a tiny further step before the resolution; can’t even tell you what was missing but I needed one more stage in the journey”.

Clearly, I’ve just changed my mind since then and I shouldn’t really say that this means I was wrong then, or that I am therefore right now. But, truly, no messing, what I wrote back then was more than a different opinion, more than just a bit wrong, it was entirely and fully bullshit.

“Midnight” is perfect and I can only wish I wrote scripts that well.

What apparently seemed to me then to be fractionally too rushed an ending now seems like a brilliant deflating of the tension, and all the more brilliant because it does not forgive its characters for what they’ve done.

It did that on a primetime terrestrial broadcast series that’s ostensibly aimed at families. It did it in an episode of a show that’s run for literally hundreds of episodes yet it took us somewhere new.

I re-read the script by Russell T Davies this morning. Even on the page, even as the page has to list deeply complicated overlapping dialogue, it is mesmerising.

Doors opening and closing

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I deeply over-adore the line that says every exit is an entrance somewhere else. But I deeply over-adore it because it comes from Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” play and every syllable of that is one I wish I’d written.

What I feel just around precisely 100% the opposite about is all of the other lines in the world that are similar but presented as instead as life lessons. Every cloud has silver bollocks, or something similar.

They are always said in an encouraging and well-meaning way, and they are often addressed to someone who is in far too bad a state to argue the semantics of it all. They often go on posters.

But.

Earlier this week, again in the middle of well-meaning-ness-osity, I read someone saying that there is a reason why you meet everyone you do in your life. Something about how either you are there to affect them, or they are to affect you.

Explain to me how that applies to a domestic abuse victim.

I don’t just mean that there are exceptions, though, I mean I think, I insist, that the entire concept is dangerously flawed. The real truth is that there are people you meet and people you don’t, and that’s it, that’s all.

There is no fate-based supernatural guiding force that means we were born to interact with this person and not that one.

So I just had a half-hour talk with a producer I really like and with whom I could talk TV forever, especially once I learned we both loved Northern Exposure. I am influenced by her, I see she will have a direct and visible impact on the script of mine we were discussing, but she wasn’t drawn to me by some fateful guiding hand.

No, I sought her out.

You seek out some people, some people seek out you, you meet others by chance, others meet you by chance, and there is a world — literally — of folks you never meet, see or even hear of.

All of this and the entrance/exit line put this in my head: there is another one that goes something like “every time a door closes, another one opens.” Myself, I’d be looking at the draughts in that house.

But also it’s cripplingly trite and I think damaging. Say you’ve just lost your job, you’ll doubtlessly hear this said by someone and if no other door has yet opened, you don’t think they’re wrong, you think you are.

I’ve lost jobs countless times and as it happens, so far, each time I’ve ultimately been glad and even wished it had happened sooner. Sometimes a lot sooner. But that’s not because some other door magically opened or I bumped into someone who transformed my life that same afternoon.

It’s because I sought out what I did next.

We seriously deny ourselves some praise here. There isn’t a deity sorting out our P45s, there isn’t a reason you and that neighbour nod when she’s out walking her dog. There is just you and me, getting on with it, getting on with our lives, and managing to do something about whatever happens to us.

That said, I’m glad I met you here.

Come back to me

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Some 19 years ago in the last week of January, 2004, I spent an entire afternoon sitting alone in a Radio Times studio in London while BBC Radio stations took turns calling me. Back then, they were calling over a broadcast-quality ISDN line and while I can’t remember how many stations there were, my job was to be on a show talking about Radio Times.

Specifically, RT that week had one of those countdown features, this time the Top Ten Spookiest Shows Ever or something like that. I presume I had worked on the feature, I know I was the only one available that day, but it’s all a bit fuzzy. I’ve just spent a quite happy 20 minutes Googling to find the barely-remembered cover.

RT Cover 2004 with borderFlash forward to this week and on Tuesday I got to do it again, from my Birmingham office and over FaceTime audio. Two decades later, I am clearly the man in demand. But it felt like I was that day because 11 BBC Local Radio stations and 1 BBC national station wanted my opinion about the return of Fawlty Towers.

Hang on. Not true. They wanted someone’s opinion, they each wanted a way to talk about this news, to get their listeners talking about it, and they wanted an extra voice in the mix. I am nothing if not an extra voice and I don’t care how I ended up getting to do this, I got to do it and I relished it.

So that’s very nice for me and also it’s not as if I believe my opinion has any particular value. Yet it looks very strongly like I’m going to give it to you anyway.

And yes, here it comes. If the question is whether Fawlty Towers should come back, the answer is there is not one single pixel of a chance you can possibly guess until it’s made – but that won’t stop us talking about it until, in my case anyway, we get sore throats.

Really the only key thing, I thought, was over the issue that it appears Connie Booth is not involved. She and John Cleese wrote the original, I’ve read the scripts, she’s tremendous and seemingly she isn’t writing this one.

Other than that, what I realised from saying this stuff over and over is why the announcement was made now. There are practically no details, certainly not any indication of where the new Fawlty Towers will be screened – and that’s why it was announced this week.

The makers are shopping this show around the networks and the streamers, and they are now able to point to the mass of attention the news got. There is public interest, there is public demand, this show is guaranteed to get high ratings. That’s what they will be saying to the streamers and they are right.

For episode 1.

Everyone will watch the first episode of a new Fawlty Towers, it’s then up to the show to keep us coming back.

Apparently last year there were 599 new scripted comedy and dramas on American television alone. That’s an unimaginable number and, possibly more significantly, an unwatchable one. You and I will never even hear of most of those shows and simply getting our attention at all must be murderously difficult.

Fawlty Towers got our attention instantly.

I think that is why shows are brought back, because they have a built-in audience and it’s sufficiently big that the return is also brought to the attention of new audiences.

Only, I do think shows finish for a reason. They do come to an end, they do often fizzle away. To work anew, they have to become a new show.

And I don’t think we want that. What we really want, always, is not a sequel, not a continuation. We want the first one again, we want to be back when we hadn’t seen that first one yet and it was all to come. We want to recapture whatever it was we were as well as what the show is.

It’s impossible for a show to live up to how we remember a beloved original, decades after it ended.

But it can be better. All that time ago in 2004, we had no idea that it would be just the next year when Doctor Who would be back and not just living up to the original, but exceeding it.

Don’t write this, write that

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I cannot count and wouldn’t even want to try counting how many times I’ve asked someone in a workshop to write something — and they haven’t. They’ve written something else instead.

If I’d said this to you last week, I’d have said it is always fantastic, it is always an absolute thrill. I can think of writers where even as I ask them to do something, I am secretly willing them to write something different, just to see what they come up with.

Today, I will say exactly the same. But I didn’t appreciate until this week that it is fantastic and thrilling for a really key reason I hadn’t even noticed.

It’s because, in all these workshops and with all these writers, their intention is solely to write well. Nobody is ignoring me just to be rude, nobody is dismissing my ideas, it’s just that what I’ve said has somehow sparked off something else and they have to write it, they have to.

There is no possible way that any of this could be anything less than joyously wonderful.

But.

These writers also know that they can do it. We’re practically playing in a workshop, they’re not commissioned, they don’t have a real deadline behind my giving them either ten minutes or until I get bored watching them write.

They also know, just as I do, that plenty of times what they write won’t work, somehow just won’t work out. And part of being a writer is knowing when to throw something away.

But then a thing came up this week about writing outside workshops, a thing which I suppose was also about ignoring everyone and writing your own thing, your own way, but it wasn’t joyous.

It was amateur.

I may be overthinking this, could be overreacting, but a writer basically wanted you to know he is a rebel. He didn’t say it, didn’t use that word, but the implication and the thrust of it all was that he’s a rebel writer, and though you or I ordinary people are not, that’s fine, that’s fine, not everyone can be rebellious, it’s not our fault that we aren’t as good as him.

No, I’m going too far there. I’d best step away from what he said because I’m being unfair, I got all of that from a word or two in a long piece that I happened to disagree with.

Let me ignore him, then, and instead focus on this amateur versus professional point of mine. What he put me in mind of is the opinion that the reason a given writer is not published is that publishers have closed ranks, that readers just don’t get him — it’s usually a him — and that ultimately he’s an undiscovered genius.

Could be.

Isn’t.

But could be.

The idea is that therefore, any writer who is discovered, who is published, has bowed to the system, has given in, is writing what the masses like.

The trouble is, you can’t do that. You cannot set out to write what the masses will like because you are wrong, you are always wrong. By the time you’ve written it and it’s been published, the masses have long moved on to something else.

Unless you’re writing about zombies, which for some unfathomable reason just will not go away. I’ve begged.

But say it is possible to somehow write what the masses like, say you can catch just the right fad or something and you can deliver what the publishing industry wants. You’re then exactly the same as every other writer who manages to do that and then there is exactly zero reason why you should be read instead of them.

You can’t and shouldn’t even try to write what you think readers will like. You and I could have a very serious coffee trying to figure out the line here, but I also hesitate about editing the way readers tell you to. I can think of a book I relished where the first three chapters were dreadful, because those were the ones that had been workshopped.

Yet despite all of this, I don’t believe you can ignore the audience. You can’t aim at them, you can’t change to suit an imaginary audience in the hope of getting a real one. But writing is not for writers, it is for readers and if they are not in your mind in some way, I think your writing becomes self-indulgent.

There are a thousand reasons to write just for yourself, with no thought of publication, and yet even then, if I do that I still have to point the writing toward an audience because otherwise I’ll just meander along aimlessly.

Okay, I’m writing to you right now and you may yet think I’m meandering.

I’m trying to find a sentence I can write here that begins “But”.

Anyway.

I don’t believe writing for an audience means giving in to the system. I do believe you have to write for yourself, but you have to do it with the intention that there will be a reader at the end.

I like the sound of being a rebel writer. I think writers have to be rebellious.

It’s just that if you regard yourself as a rebel simply because you’re not published, because the world doesn’t understand you, then you’re not a rebel writer, you’re probably just a shit one.

One law

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This is a side point, but I know you know the phrase “one law for the rich, another for the poor”, or something of that sort. It’s not like that’s an alien concept today. But it’s also not the original quote.

Neither is this, but it’s closer in spirit to the — presumably — French phrase that Anatole France said. Anatole France being of course the French philospher whose work I’ve admired since I found him in a Google search a moment ago.

Anyway.

The quote I know, based on his French original, goes thisaway: “One law for rich and poor alike, which prohibits them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.”

I think that is so astute. The law is the same for all of us, but it doesn’t affect the rich. Again, hardly an alien concept today. But the more familiar version, the one rule for them and one for us edition, lacks the nastiness of the original. The two rules version is trite, I think, where “one law” is bitter.

And I have thought this since long before there even was a Google. In fact, I’ve thought it since it was said in a 1976 episode of The Tomorrow People, written by Roger Price.

It’s just that I thought it again on Wednesday night, though not because anything bad or unlawful was happening. I was at a Royal Television Society screening of the new ITV drama “Nolly”, written by Russell T Davies. Short version: it’s perfection. Slightly longer version: it’s perfection about Noele Gordon, 1970s and 1980s star of Crossroads. I wrote an episode of that soap’s revial in the early 2000s and part of the pleasure was in how, even if I wouldn’t say I had been a fan, I would regularly say I defend the original soap against its many detractors.

Detractors who do have a point, to be fair. But still, I lived next door to one of the cast and I’m from Birmingham where the soap was set. It was rubbish, but it was our rubbish.

Anyway.

The screening was followed by a Q&A with the cast and crew, including Russell T Davies. And this is where I want to join a dot, if a really tenuous one. For some reason, the subject came up about how he writes dialogue and that led Davies into a brief aside about – I’m paraphrasing – the insanity of separating out writing into parts. He gave the example of people who say they’re going to work on character now, for instance, where in truth character is dialogue is story is dialogue is character.

“It’s all one thing,” he said. I’m parrot phrasing.

When someone whose writing you admire says the same thing you think, it doesn’t matter that he says it better, he’s still saying it and you feel vindicated.

I have a friend who sees dialogue as — his words — “a tasty extra” that you do last of all. Write the script, then go back to work on what words the characters say.

I think you can imagine what words I say to that. This is a family show so I’ll let you think of the absolute rudest word you can, so long as you promise to prefix it with the clarifying phrase “fucking bollocks”.

To be fair, I think that friend believes dialogue comes last because he wants to put it off. We all have things we can’t do, that we can’t write, and plenty of novelists are better known for their description than for their dialogue. ‘Course, my friend is a scriptwriter, so he’s screwed.

Davies did also say, in one sense, that dialogue comes last. He said that you’ve been thinking about the characters for so long, once you get to writing the script, the dialogue just comes out.

I won’t disagree with him, I don’t believe you can ever disagree with someone else’s process since it’s their process, not yours, except obviously when they think dialogue is a tasty extra. But that bit about thinking about the characters for long gives me pause. Quite a short pause, I suppose, because for me I find the characters in the writing. So I tend to set off down that script road, aguably too soon, arguably too quickly, but I go there and if it’s rubbish I turn back.

But then that’s my rule, you may have a different one.