The backside dilemma

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I’ve been working on the Writers’ Guild Awards for just about a year, so I got to go to the event last Monday. I will never show you pictures because they are startlingly visible evidence that I was even more ill than I thought.

Even so, even being ill, even being there not because I was nominated for anything but because it was work – I suppose it was work – the Writers’ Guild Awards event is the place to be. It is the room to get in if you possibly can and, if anything, I thought this year’s was the best of a remarkable run.

And although it didn’t win its category, “Slow Horses” by Will Smith was nominated and I am actually proud of that. I didn’t write that excellent show, I wasn’t a judge in that category, but I was the one who entered it into the awards.

But then, it’s such a strong show and the Writers’ Guild Awards ceremony is about the best British writing, it had to be entered, it had to be considered.

Consequently that wasn’t me, that was just necessary.

And although I worked on the awards for a year, obviously so did many people. Yet when it came to the night itself, all my jobs were long done and consequently out of all the people working there, I was the sole one who could relax with nothing to do.

I did end up with the odd task but still, the actual event on the night was neither one pixel better or worse because I was there.

So I had a great time, a really tremendous time, and the night was a success. Plus so far in 2023 I can point to various things I’ve learned already, various things I’ve made happen or just plain made, I can think of people I’ve met and things I’ve done.

I suppose.

Well, more than suppose, just before you and I started talking I actually made a list for myself of what I’ve done so far.

But.

I had to write that list because it still feels like we’re only just back working after Christmas and that nothing has happened, that I’ve done nothing. For some reason I am finding 2023 murderously difficult to get going in. Today is January 20 and suddenly, this very second writing to you, what occurs to me is that it’s therefore eight weeks since I had a haircut.

That’s my January. An absence of barbershops. It’s not an accomplishment.

So here’s the thing. Without question, I need to get up off my backside and bloody do something. Except I’m a writer, so what I need to do is sit that backside right down and write.

You see the dilemma.

Give it a reset

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Take a look at this, please.

Fame script excerptI’m trying to see from your face whether you recognise any of that, but all I can see is that you’re looking a lot younger than me. I will try to still like you.

Anyway, if you do recognise it, I guarantee that you only recognise the first 17 words of the speech, not a single syllable after them. And you’re not really reading those 17, you’re hearing Debbie Allen saying them.

It’s the Fame speech. I think Allen delivers those lines in the opening title sequence of every one of that show’s 136 episodes. Certainly it’s in most of them, and I’ve just recently learned that she does different versions of it for some of the different seasons of the series.

Debbie Allen is this remarkable talent, a true and admirable star in so many fields, but curiously I don’t think her delivery of that speech works in any version other than the first one. The one where it wasn’t this famous line being delivered practically like a quotation, instead where it was just a single line of dialogue in an hour script.

Specifically in Fame, season 1, episode 1, “Metamorphosis” by Christopher Gore.

Imagine writing a line that an unfathomably enormous number of people remember vividly, decades later.

Gore wrote the 1980 film, which is frankly better: it’s less about fame, more about failure, and it stands up very well. He also wrote the pilot episode for the series and I understand it went through a lot of changes before it even got to the draft script I’ve just read. The changes were all to help make a series out of a movie, and I don’t know how many other hands were involved.

Nonetheless, “Metamorphosis” is different to both the film and the rest of the series. I’d say there are three Fames – the film, this pilot script and then the rest of the series – but don’t get me started on how many versions there are. There’s also been a TV reboot, a film remake, and countless stage productions.

If nothing else, they surely milked that idea dry.

Only, as fond as I was of the show’s early years when I saw them in the 1980s and how I’ve mostly enjoyed reading – so far – 21 of the scripts – I think it’s an idea that ran out of milk really soon.

I wrote about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome a few months ago, just a couple of pieces for the programme for their production of the stage version. In one of them, though, I offered that the reason the series is remembered as being brighter and lighter than the film is that it had whole seasons to tell its stories, not just two hours.

That could have been true and certainly I convinced myself, writing that while deep in COVID. But now reading the scripts, seeing some episodes, Fame seems to be an archetype of a certain 1970s/80s US TV format that I don’t like. It’s the type usually described as having a reset switch. Huge emotional upheaval happens in an episode, but it’s all fine at the end. That kind of thing.

Not that Fame has really huge emotional upheaval in the series, but does land some very good moments and they are then forgotten.

Today we might still know a guest star is never going to be heard of again, but what happens in one episode of a series has an impact that lasts. I’ve always thought that was better than the reset switch, and I’ve always thought it for a dozen reasons, but this week I’ve got a new one.

The reset switch is meant to mean that everything goes back to normal at the end of each episode. But in effect, what that inevitably means is that every episode is starting from scratch next time. There’s no follow through, so there’s no momentum, so each time it’s right, let’s do it again.

I think that’s why Fame seems, to me, to struggle for stories very early on its run. Some episodes seem more forced than others, more “this’ll do” than anything else. Apparently there is one right toward the end of the run where the studio asked whether the producers really wanted to do this story and the producers said it’s this or it’s a two-week production shut down while we try to think of something good.

Still, even with a reset-switch Fame, you get episodes like “A Tough Act to Follow” by Virginia Aldridge where I haven’t got the script, I haven’t seen it recently, but I still remember its punch from 40 years ago.

So I’m not saying that a reset-switch series can’t be any good, I’m just now thinking that it is bloody murder to keep coming up with entirely standalone stories where you’ve got to take us from everything-is-peachy and on to everything-is-peachy-again. I don’t think you can raise the stakes as high when you’re being pulled down at the start and the end.

Curiously, there was one key series that famously and very noticeably ignored the reset switch. I’m sure there were others in the transition phrase between the 1980s and our present golden age of television drama, but one was noticeable because of its background and where its writers came from.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. If you’re thinking I couldn’t go further away from Fame if I tried, I see your point, but Deep Space Nine was the fourth Star Trek series and the preceding three were all primarily reset-switch ones. Very famously against the demands of the studio making it, Deep Space Nine kept on having good people do bad things and living with the consequences. There were consequences. They lasted throughout the run of the series, they weren’t tied off in a neat bow at the end of the hour.

And a key writer in making that happen, in even taking on his studios in protracted fights, was Ira Steven Behr. Yes. He wrote for Fame and then he showran Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Mind you, this week I learned that Fame’s showrunner, William Blinn, went on to write Prince’s movie, “Purple Rain”, and that now seems a bigger jolt.

I think I’ll shut up here, before I admit to you that in the 1980s, I had the most enormous crush on one of the Fame dancers. Phew. Nearly admitted that.

Pipped to the post

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During the pandemic, I did a lot of interviewing of people and there was one man who got quite anxious before the call. He was a very good, very interesting interviewee and I’m sure he’s rarely anxious, but he was then and for one single reason.

The time.

He told me that he had been on a Zoom meeting that was overruning and all the way through, he could see the clock on his computer and knew I would phone at exactly the time I said. Exactly. And that because we were all in lockdown, because we were all on computers, my exact time would be the same as his exact time.

We talked about that after the interview. How it used to be that you didn’t assume people would turn up on the stroke of whatever time it was, since your clock and their watch would be a bit out.

He was right, that’s gone now. And I like it: if I arrange to meet or to phone you at a certain time, you can be certain I will. On the button. So our use of internet time servers to regulate our computers and our phones and our smartwatches suits me fine.

Only.

On New Years’ Eve, we were watching BBC1 for the countdown to 2023 and because we were watching on the BBC iPlayer, it was late. We’d done the “Watch Live” bit, we weren’t ten minutes behind on demand, but the time it took that countdown to go from BBC1 through the internet to our smart TV, it was a significant delay.

And it always is. I’m shocked how little I listen to BBC Radio 4 these days, but I know it still has the pips to mark the top of the hour — and I know they’re wrong. It used to be that you couldn’t broadcast those pips under any circumstances other than the top of the hour, so dramas that used them had to find some reason to cut away before the full pip time signal was given.

Now you can hear it anytime you like on the BBC iPlayer, because the playback from that is not a discrete recording of any individual show, it is a time-based slice of BBC output. If you want the 18:30 comedy, you get it, plus anything else aired from about 18:30 to about 19:00, sometimes a little before and after.

So here we are with instant access to everything. Here are major global news operations like the BBC, still just occasionally putting out this fiction of the time being what they say it is.

Mind you, you know the BBC started its coverage of the 2023 countdown at exactly the right time, it was internet connections and latency and all sorts of things that delayed at my end.

Whereas CNN just cocked it up entirely through human error. They were playing live music, they forgot the countdown. There was some issue with a technical problem they hadn’t bothered to fix, but that’s just more human error in the end.

And I don’t know why, but in this age of picosecond precision, as much as I like that, I enjoyed hearing about CNN. I know it wasn’t deliberate but, still, good on them.

2022 That Ending Explained

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Sometimes I wonder if our growing use of emoji instead of words means our civilisation is in decline. But then more sensible thoughts prevail and I realise that no, it’s our political systems that are destroying it.

But in between emoji and the end of Western civilisation lies That Ending Explained.

Whether you’ve seen Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion or not, please google a phrase like “Glass Onion That Ending Explained”, and click to get only the video results. At time of writing, you will see 17 YouTube vidoes on the topic.

This is Glass Onion. I enjoyed it hugely but I did not leave the cinema confused by anything other than how briefly Netflix was allowing for its theatrical run. Or possibly also by how the print at that screening was a little fuzzy for a digital projection.

But the ending, nope. One of the hundred reasons Glass Onion is such a pleasure is that it ends very well, very neatly. It’s a murder mystery and a delight in how twisting the journey is, but it’s not like you can possibly leave the film not knowing whodunnit and how and why.

I did need telling why the script is being entered into awards under the “adapted screenplay” category instead of “original”, but don’t turn to That Ending Explained to find out. (It’s because it’s a new, original story – but it features the character of Benoit Blanc, created for a previous movie.)

Anyway. These 17 YouTubers think we need telling everything obvious.

Or rather, 17 YouTubers think we’ll watch.

For That Ending Explained is the video equivalent of the “17 Royal Secrets About Sex and Mice — Number 6 will Blow Your Mind” kind of articles.

But we can kill off That Ending Explained videos by just not watching them. And instead watching the films they want to profit off.

When I started writing to you it was only going to be to wish you a happy new year. Instead, I seem to have turned grumpy.

Please explain this ending to me.

Top Ten favourite scripts of 2022

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Previously on Self Distract… I’ve read scripts all my life and I love it, but since late December 2017, I’ve read at least one per day. Once a year I do a personal top ten for no very clear reason, although oddly it wasn’t until I wrote 2021’s list that I realised how thematically connected all ten were.

Anyway. Now, read on.

There’s obviously a week or two left of 2022 and I will continue to read a script every day, but up to this moment, I’ve read 515 during the year. That’s about typical, especially if I’ve been involved in any awards judging and I have again this year.

But otherwise, this has been an unusual year because – so far – 238 of the scripts I read were from the same show. Doctor Who. Chiefly the 1963-1989 version, though I’m only up to 1981, and some scattered reading of the revived series, scattered because I’ve already read those and usually was just going back to re-read good ones.

Speaking of good, as well as counting the scripts I read because that’s obviously vitally important to me for some reason, I do also make an extremely brief note next to each. Good. That word comes up a lot. Of the 238 Doctor Who scripts, a near majority were “good”, though there were some that were “a bit tedious”, others that were “fine” or “okay”.

Then there were five that I noted as being “very good” — and by coincidence, also five that I’ve listed as being “utter shite altogether”. Details on application.

None of the Doctor Who scripts made my personal top ten for the year, although Blink by Steven Moffat might’ve got in if it hadn’t been the fourth time I’d read it.

It’s not like my top 10 is significant, but then for completeness, it’s also definitely not in any way statistically valid. My top 10 for 2022, just for starters, contains only a single script that was actually written in 2022. The rest range across all of recorded history, making the list this year only because I happened to read them in 2022.

So don’t see this as judgement or pontification or anything remotely about me, other than how this is a way I can show you ten pieces of writing I think are brilliant – and include links out to nearly all of them. If you don’t happen to have read them already, I envy you having them ahead of you.

10. Justified: The I of the Storm by Dave Andron (read online on January 16)
9. Battlestar Galactica: Mini-Series by Ronald D. Moore (read part one, part two online on November 20 and 21)
8. Motherland: Pilot by Holly Walsh, Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan, and Helen Linehan read online March 28)
7. My So-Called Life: Dancing in the Dark by Winnie Holzman (read online April 23)
6. Slow Horses: Failure’s Contagious by Will Smith (read December 6)
5. Lou Grant: Nazi by Robert Schlitt (read April 22)
4. Peggy for You by Alan Plater (read January 24, buy from Amazon)
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (read July 10, buy from Amazon)
2. CODA by Sian Heder, based on La Famille Bélier by Victoria Bedos, Thomas Bidegain, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Éric Lartigau (read online February 12)
1. Derry Girls: Season 3 Special: The Agreement by Lisa McGee (read September 29)

Peggy for You and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are stage plays, CODA is a film, and the rest are TV. Thank you to Hat Trick for the Derry Girls script, and Apple TV+ for Slow Horses.

Thanks too, to Charles Martin who got me a lot of 1970s and 1980s Doctor Who scripts. .

And most especially to possibly my favourite site on the internet, TV Writing. Only 20 of this year’s scripts came from there, and I am astonished because it’s usually so many more.

I expect it will be in 2023.

Mental health, stat

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I’ve stopped counting something as of today, in fact as of just about when you’re reading this. Let me be clear, I count a lot of things and I’m unlikely to ever stop, except for this one.

Look, I’ve been told all this counting and measuring is quite a male thing to do, and I do definitely recognise that it’s easier to count things you’ve done than to do anything more. But usually it helps me, it helps when I don’t have any other sense of progress. I’d like a sense of improvement, but I settle for a count of progress, and usually I like it.

Even when I don’t, though, normally that’s not some great difficult problem for me. Such as this week, for instance, when I could count the number of failed holidays and it would be 1. (I’m supposed to be away this week, but between check-in and security at the airport, the flight was cancelled and consequently the ability to join a few days’ river cruise was ended.)

So that count of 1 isn’t great. But then since I’ve been supposed to be away, I’ve tried to be away and another number has actually taught me something. Since last Saturday morning, I have accrued 387 emails that I haven’t replied to. Also something like 30 that I have, just because I saw them come in and also they needed replies right away.

But even adding those in, that’s just 417 and what I’ve learned is that this is a lot fewer than I’d have expected. Which means that what I’ve really learned is that I generate a lot of emails in my regular work.

So counting is educational, sometimes, and sometimes it’s not very happy, like Failed Holiday: 1.

Normally, though, I like it a lot. I like that I can tell you I’ve read 505 scripts this year and written 7, not counting the 38 YouTube videos in my 58keys series that I’ve also scripted. I like that I can tell you I’ve read 33 books, watched 293 episodes of Doctor Who, done 1,455 jobs, sent 63 invoices, and been made 1 of the Writers’ Guild’s 2 Deputy Chairs. Plus 9 school visits, 7 BBC Radio appearances, 50 Self Distract blogs, 19 podcast or webinar guest appearances, and 25 workshops.

I like all that despite the fact that it’s meaningless. Now I’ve looked it up, I think that 1,455 jobs sounds scarily low, but otherwise there’s no target I’m aiming for with any of this and, most especially, I’m not trying to compare myself to anyone or anything.

But there is one thing I count that hurts. Today was the 1,307th day of my learning French through Duoloingo – and it is the last.

That’s no slight against Duolingo and obviously not against French. What it is, is a recognition that the number stabs me. Duolingo relentlessly tells you the number of days you’ve been using it, and it is a knife. It’s got so I either do Duolingo realy early in the morning to get it out of the way, or very, very late at night when I’ve run out of ways to postpone it.

Follow. I had what – to me – was a severe writing and career blow earlier this year. It was to do with a project that I began while in a hotel in Hull, the same night that I started Duolingo. I can still see me there in that room, downloading the app. And by chance the project was destroyed on precisely day 1,000 of my using Duolingo.

If it had been any other day, maybe I wouldn’t be quitting Duolingo now. But today that damn app was telling me that it’s been 307 days since it happened. And yesterday it told me it was 306. 305. 304. Every fucking day.

You can argue that I should get over myself and I cannot disagree. The project that died was a single 45-minute radio drama and you can argue that there are few smaller things in this world. Okay, there I might disagree a bit, I might throw in phrases like deathbed promise and lifetime writing ambition, but yes, I should long ago have forgotten it and moved on like an adult.

But I haven’t got over it and I am not an adult and if it’s no longer as paralysing as it was for the first few months, say days 1,000 to 1,175, then it is still colouring everything and I have got to shake this off.

Starting with killing this daily reminder of failure. I don’t know that it will help, but I am, naturally, counting on it.

Everywhere

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I was as startled as you by the death of Christine McVie, but I also didn’t notice that she left Fleetwood Mac for – hang on, checking again – about 15 years. Simply did not notice.

That’s pretty bad, even for a man. But she was with the band, then later she was with the band, and in between it seems they did bugger-all. I’m going to let myself off.

And instead remember that McVie grew up about six pixels away from where I am right now in Birmingham. And instead also remember that I only recently got into her 2017 album with Lindsey Buckingham, the imaginatively titled “Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie” album. But I really got into it.

Plus there is this. It might be a running joke for anyone who has ever worked in a radio station, but I used to call out “they’re playing our song” whenever any one of about 11,000 tracks were played. Something like 11,000, or however many singles there were in the BHBN Hospital Radio library where I met my wife.

There were actually special ones in that library, though. I will forever remember having to carry a show on past time because the next presenter was running around the library trying to gather up their singles while I was playing out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.

I’ll also remember who faded out John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” before the end and so wrecked the entire narrative structure of that song.

But maybe mostly, I’ll remember “Everywhere“. By Christine McVie.

It was released in November 1987 when I was 22 and initially it was in heavy rotation on every station because it was new and because it was good. Later it became a favourite for a reason I’m half proud of, half not.

There is a skill in talking up to the vocals on a song, to knowing just by sense and feel when the lyrics will start and so being able to speak up to that instant while making it sound like that’s just when you would’ve finished and shut up anyway.

It’s just not a skill that has any use outside of a radio station. Since I’d rather listen to the music than to a presenter, I’m not 100% convinced it has any use inside of a radio station either.

Nonetheless, you could either do it or not, and the fact that every single record in the library had a note of how many seconds the intro lasts, was no help.

Except in Everywhere, it got a little trickier and therefore — by some measure, anyway — more satisfying.

For although Everywhere has a 22-second intro, its then first lyric — the very soft “Calling out your name” — lasts for exactly 1 second and is followed by another 6 seconds before the vocals really get going. So you can talk up to the 22-second mark, you can say a huge amount up to there, take a one-second breath, then drop in a 6-second station ident.

Make even a one-second mistake and you crash the lyrics, it sounds awful. Granted, get it perfectly right and you’re still talking over an excellent song and so you sound awful.

But it was irresistible. The average speaking speed of a presenter is 3 words per second, so you could say 66 words up to the first lyric — even if you didn’t begin until you started the track. And you could then say 18 words in the gap, if you didn’t have a cart with a pre-recorded ident to hand.

Of all her accomplishments in writing, I suspect Christine McVie didn’t even know about this one.

Plus while I remembered all of this about the radio station, I did just have to go listen to Everywhere to check those timings. The memory of the radio work is faded, the music remains clear.

It is astounding to me that I can just listen to it now, to call up pretty much anything I want, certainly anything I’ve heard of, and listen immediately.

And listen without some prat like me firing off a jingle at 23 seconds into the track.

Balls

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Dear Diary, I am 57 years old and I have just watched a football match for the first time. “Dear William,” replies Diary, “you were eating chocolate cake at a Royal Television Society awards dinner while they played some match on screens that you didn’t look at. It doesn’t count.”

So it remains that my only experience of football is the first bit of a game at some ground where a team played another team and as I walked in, the entire crowd sensed my expertise and turned to me like a wall. As soon as I was done with whatever radio work I was doing, I turned away from them and escaped.

I do wonder if I’m missing out by having this total absence of sport. During that RTS dinner, a waitress standing behind me yelped – actually yelped – with excitement at whatever was happening on the screen. I asked her what I’d missed, she explained and I understood, I just didn’t feel it. I was excited meeting Ellie Simmonds at the dinner, but while I wouldn’t say this to her, I was thinking yeah, yeah, sport, amazing, now what about Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s possible I did say that.

It was not the longest conversation I’ve ever had, but it was work. My wife Angela Gallagher and I were tasked with briefing each of the presenters at the awards, which took six to ten seconds per person, then fetching them from their tables when they were needed to get ready. It was probably a total of twenty minutes spread out over the evening, but it was work and so it was bliss. A really gorgeous dinner, a really great crowd, and instead of sitting there at a table all evening, I got to run around the whole place in a tuxedo. Since I believe fervently that it is better to be crew than passenger, it was wonderful.

And I got to see Angela at work. I can’t explain this, but given a task, Angela switched from dinner guest to a kind of producer-mode. It was like a light switch had been thrown and seeing her in action, even on the same task I was doing right there with her, even in this smallest part we were of the event, it was fantastic.

It also wasn’t sport and when you and I started today, I’d intended to tell you a sports story in which I sound like an idiot. Let me see if I can turn that around at all.

Follow. It’s some time in the 1980s or 1990s, it’s a Saturday or possibly a Sunday, and I’m working at BBC Radio WM for a man who actually scared me but I can’t remember his name. It’s possible that I am not as scarred by this event as I thought. But at the time, as much as I love radio work, I would head for BBC Pebble Mill with a stone in my stomach, I was so afraid of all I had to do. Looking back, I think that’s close to laughable because I was as ever the smallest cog in something, but radio requires constant concentration, minute by minute and sometimes second by second focus, for hours.

Quick side story. At this time I was spending my week writing manuals for some corporation or other. And I remember the contrast used to tickle me. In their office, there would be discussions about how tight some deadline was, and that deadline would be four months away. At BBC Pebble Mill, the deadline would more typically be the length of time it takes to open a fader, to slide a control up and take a microphone live. Both deadlines were real, both entirely valid, but the contrast delighted me. Plus I remember standing with a woman who mentioned how it had been raining when we left the office the previous evening and to me, having then done a shift on an evening newspaper, then a breakfast show spell on a radio station and then a day writing manuals, the previous evening felt like a century ago.

Anyway. I’m just putting things off now.

On this particularly memorable Saturday or Sunday in the 1980s or 1990s, I was driving the desk for a sports show and for the first time, I was on my own. There was a lot of this sports stuff going on and so much so, all of it apparently so crucial that the presenter who scared me was out at one of the games or matches or whatever they’re called in whichever sport it was. Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

That presenter was the producer and via talkback from whatever ground – that’s the word, ground – he was at, he was still producing, but I was the central small cog. My job was primarily to switch between that presenter here and this reporter there, to switch over to the news, I don’t know, lots of different sources and I was the one putting them to air. I love this work and I still think an old Mark III BBC Local Radio desk is a thing of wooden beauty.

All is going well. But then even though every possible presenter was out reporting live from every possible venue — maybe that’s the word — there was also other sport going on around the world and some of it was apparently significant. So another job I had was to tell this scary presenter what the latest results from them all were. This was before anything useful like the internet or mobile phones existed, there was then no way for this presenter to know any of these other results if I didn’t tell him over talkback.

And there was no way for me to know the results either, except that like every station and every newspaper, we had a TV with Ceefax on. I would later write for Ceefax and relish it, but right then it was just this thing that showed me sports results.

Including what turned out to be a world-record-breaking cricket score.

I must’ve read out more than a dozen scores down the line to the scary presenter and he would then casually slip them in to his on-air commentary as if he were hardwired into sport everywhere. He was scary, but I think he was very good, too. Until the time came when I read out this world-record-breaking score and he did not know what to do.

It was such a big score, I mean, it broke a world record. And he was hearing it from me. Only from me. You’re on his side now, or you certainly should be, because even I wouldn’t trust that I was reading a score correctly. On that day, whenever it was, BBC Radio WM became the very last place to report on a world record in cricket, and BBC Radio WM was the only place to say live on air that they didn’t trust the eejit back at the studio.

I was that eejit. And as it turned out, I was completely accurate and correct: I could not explain to you what the score meant, but I was reading it entirely correctly.

Yeah, no, even I was and still am on the side of that scary presenter in this one.

Next yearn

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I’d like some credit here for speed: I think there’s a decent chance that this is the first conversation you’ve had about 2023. Except it is more about 2022 and how, for me, that feels like it’s already over.

This is partly because I’m writing an episode of my little 58keys YouTube series that can only run in Christmas week, but also I’m doing a thing in December. It’s called a holiday and I’m sure you’ve read about these too, but for such a long time now, I’ve spoiled the first couple of days of a break, even or especially if that break is just a couple of days. I’ll have been working up to the last conceivable second, quite often beyond that, too, and the moment I’m clear of all the work, I get sick.

You know about this, too, though I hope not from experience. The adrenaline is spent, the momentum is gone, you’re clutching your stomach and examining porcelain close up, knowing you’re going to have to clean that next and that lasagne is not always the great idea it seemed.

So the plan is to not do that.

This seems like a plan.

But it entails scheduling the work better and, frankly, dropping a lot of it. I’ve got a little while yet but two weeks before this break, I will stop getting up at 05:00. I won’t take on any evening work that I haven’t already committed to. I will take time off in order to then take some time off.

Which could be okay, except for this. It means the year is over.

That’s a huge exaggeration, obviously, but it’s not very long until this Great Two Week Pause before the holiday, then there’s the couple of days away, and when I’m back it will be full-on late December. I am not going to get any new projects off the ground before the end of 2022.

It’s just hard to see another year go when I haven’t achieved anything. I did double the subscribers to that YouTube channel, and actually I write it each week so I have just been paid for something like 45 scripts this year. I did run a newsroom for a spell, did get to judge on a couple of awards, have become Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild once more, have read exactly ten times more scripts than I’ve written. And yesterday I unblocked a sink. So, you know, there’s that. I also saw The Pensioners from Fame in concert.

But I cannot seem to shake how this was the year I should have had a BBC Radio 4 play on. That one small thing, just 45 minutes, would have defined 2022 for me and instead the fact that legal problems destroyed it, that appears to have defined 2022 for me.

I have met a lot of people this year, surprisingly often through that 58keys series, and I cherish that. But I’ll be glad to step over into 2023 and do that year properly.

But first I’ll spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about how the word “year” is so close to “yearn”.

Finding your real calling

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The moment I’ve hit Send on this to you, I am out the door and driving to a school. I go in to schools sometimes as a visiting author and the conceit is that I am there to talk about being a writer, sure, where the truth is I instead make ’em write. I have no intention of telling school pupils about me, chiefly because I already know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s write something brilliant together.

Only, there’s a small difference today in that the school I’m visiting is a secondary one and although it’s still a writing day, when you’re with people who are soon going to have to pick subjects and choose career paths, there is the question of whether you recommend writing as a career. I won’t discourage anyone wanting to write, but I won’t insist that it is anything other than the greatest job you can possibly have — if it’s right for you. And I will insist, on the slightest excuse, that being able to write is enormously useful regardless of the career you go into.

Be the footballer who also writes and you’ll be able to convey whatever it is that’s apparently so interesting about kicking a ball about. Plus that communication skill – look, you know this already, being able to communicate and convey helps anyone.

Only, I have this week discovered that I’m not supposed to be a writer.

To be fair, I’ve suspected it often and occasionally been told so by a reader.

But this week I got the email from LinkedIn. If you don’t happen to use LinkedIn or if you do happen to ignore its emails, what you may not be aware of is that it will tell you if someone has been searching for you on the service. It tells you specifically so that you will spend money to find out more, but even without doing that, you get some details. Plus it’s rather nice, to think someone out there you’ve probably never heard of, is looking for you.

I write that and it sounds ominous.

But you get the LinkedIn email and it has a subject heading like “You appeared in eight searches this week.” It is quite possible that I even preened.

Only, among the detail that you get, there is this. How they found you. Apparently in my case, none of the eight people sought me out by name, which is obviously fine, and not one of them considered me to be a writer or anything even vaguely approaching that. Instead, all eight found me by a keyword search, which is illuminating.

Because – truly – the words these people used to find me were: “food source”.

Funny, again it’s only when I write that down that it seems deeply ominous.