750

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Possibly I’m wrong here because you do seem more organised than I do, but I am pretty sure you have never counted how many conversations you’ve had with someone. And apparently I have, because it turns out that this is the 750th Self Distract blog I’ve written.

If you’re going to count something, I feel you may as well do it thoroughly so after some poking around, I can tell you something. Over the 749 Self Distract posts up to this one, I’ve written 587,160 words, including several good ones. I mean, I’ve written the word “myriad” and used it correctly 24 times.

Self Distract in any recognisable form started in February 2006, which is frankly another country. It didn’t become a weekly natter with you until after I left Radio Times in 2012 or so.

I’d like to say it’s been an unbroken weekly blather every Friday, but that’s not quite true. The result of the Brexit vote was announced on Friday, June 24, 2016, for instance, and I was too paralysed to move.

Then there was pretty much the whole of December 2017 when my website was broken. But apart from two total failures, then, it’s been every week for a decade, so an otherwise unbroken run of 521 Self Distracts.

Some 500 posts ago, I told myself I was writing this because I missed having the deadlines I did of a TV history column in Radio Times and a DVD review one in BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online. They all seemed to end at the same time and I do miss them, but really I was writing Self Distract to write to you and that’s done me a lot of good over the years.

Often it’s been the one quiet, still moment in my week. In bad weeks it’s been the one quiet refuge. It’s continually been a lagrange point, which is something I apparently first mentioned as being on my mind back in 2013.

Other times what I’ve written here has been indirectly responsible for my being commissioned to write various things. And once it was directly responsible for my being flown to California, where I got to meet a couple of my writing heroes.

But looking back over half a million words, I keep seeing times when I was trying to describe something that I didn’t understand. And the action of trying to describe it to you visibly helped me see what I meant, helped me see why I felt the way I did about something.

Self Distract is about writing, about what we write about, and what we write with when we get around to writing. It is inescapably a journal of what is on my mind, yet it’s not a diary. I am not writing it to me, I’m writing it to you, specifically you, and whether I’ve done that well or poorly, the focus has helped me. Thank you.

There is nothing good but remembering makes it so

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I think about this a lot. Maybe there isn’t any art that is good or bad by itself, it is made one or the other by whether we remember it. So for instance, YouTube just chucked a “20 Famous TV Themes” video at me and every single one was shite altogether, except for the five I remembered, which were were all masterpieces of musical construction.

And then I went to see a reunion concert from a group that with infinite regret must now be called the Pensioners from Fame. They put on a good show, they put on a good night, but last weekend I watched the recording and now it felt like they were constrained by the past. Songs written very quickly on a 1980s TV show’s schedule felt thinner than the 2022 concert treated them. Putting it back on a screen should have worked, but they became tunes to remind you of what they used to sound like, or what you were like when you first listened to them. They weren’t songs that stirred much more than memory.

Though to be fair, there were songs I didn’t know and they weren’t bad.

I stopped watching Fame when it went into first-run syndication. You’re looking at me now. For its first two seasons, it was on NBC network TV and was shot on film. Then NBC dropped it, but everywhere outside the US loved this show so much that they paid for it to continue, they just didn’t pay enough. So the last four seasons were shot on video and even all that time ago, the drop in image quality was too much for me. So there were songs at the reunion concert that I’d not heard before, and the cast included actors I hadn’t seen before.

So with them, I was freed from the memory and the associations that are forever locked to the songs I did know. Yet it still felt as if what was being celebrated at the reunion was a memory seen from so very far away.

Still, by chance I also recently got to write about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome’s theatre programme as they put on the stage version. I got to say that bit about NBC cancelling it and the BBC putting up some cash. I also got to say, which I so strongly believe, that the original film by Christopher Gore was far more about failure than fame and, incidentally, I still rate the movie’s music highly.

What I didn’t get to say because there wasn’t room, it wasn’t relevant to the piece and because I’m not entirely sure anyone would have believed, is what a writer of the TV show went on to do next. Ira Steven Behr went from the bright and cheery Fame to the bleakest but also the best of the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine.

I have no idea why that pleases me so much.

The best writer in our price range

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This is exactly how I was introduced at an event last Saturday: “William Gallagher, the best writer who was available today and is in our price range.” It is a tremendous line, it got a laugh from the audience and from everybody I’ve told it to since, including you right now. And I think the reason it works, the reason it is funny is because of course it’s true.

If you’re producing an event, you want the best person you can get. And then inevitably, you have to settle for the best person you can get.

When that’s me, then I don’t care how many better people you asked first, I call it a win.

Normally, though, you don’t get people saying anything even remotely like “we wanted Phoebe Waller-Bridge but managed to find this guy in a bar ten minutes ago and figured he’ll do in a pinch.” No, typically you make me, or whoever, sound great because then at least your show doesn’t immediately seem like it settled for rubbish. Better to be seen to make a poor choice of guest than to admit you only had a poor choice.

So usually, I don’t get announced as being cheap and available. But even as that introduction last weekend said I was both of these things, it was also saying that I was I was welcome and that I was with friends. It said that they knew I’d be delighted by the line. That line and the laugh it gave me knocked the pre-event nerves out of my system, too. And at the same time, it completely conveyed to the audience the warm tone of the entire event.

By being frank, even as a joke, it was saying we’re all in this together and we all get it, we are all friends there. And in every sense, that set the stage.

That is a remarkable feat for one opening line.

I’d tell you now that it was said by poet Jonathan Davidson, except he was worried later that I’d not been okay with it, so I won’t tell you his name until I’m sure I’ve reassured him sufficiently. And until he’s far enough away to not hear when I tell you I am stealing that line for every event I can manage.

Ten seconds and one hundred years of the BBC

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Some time in the 1980s, I was working on the BBC Radio WM breakfast show and there must’ve been some news thing going on about Doctor Who. I can’t remember what it was, but I can very clearly picture me in what was called Area 3 at BBC Pebble Mill, working the phones – and at about 07:00 phoning Doctor Who writer Johnny Byrne to get his reaction.

His reaction was that he had been asleep and was extremely unhappy at me for waking him. And I think that actually ended the conversation we’d been slowly having through letters after I’d written to him enthusing about his script for The Keeper of Traken.

(Just as an aside, I finally got to read that Doctor Who script of his in August. This year. Specifically August 26, 2022, where episode 1 was the 335th script I’d read this year. And August 26 is 41 years, 6 months and 26 days after the show aired. It took me 15,182 days to get to read the script whose finished show I’d so enjoyed. And I have got to stop using WolframAlpha to tell me these things.)

Anyway.

On Tuesday this week, I was called up by BBC Radio Leicester and BBC CWR to talk about the 100 years of the BBC. I was better on the Leicester one, but what strikes me is that this BBC phone interview was at about 07:30. It was arranged in advance, plus I’d been up working for hours anyway, yet still I had this moment of quantum-entanglement-like connection with distant me phoning Johnny Bryne all those years ago.

And to me, the real answer about the best moments of the BBC’s 100 years, was in the moments before I went on air. I’m prepared, I believe I’m professional, and I like how I will have been listening to the show for an hour beforehand and so can pick up on related points. But when I’m on the line waiting, I can also feel the atmosphere that’s in the studio and in whatever their equivalent of Area 3 is.

You know when you work in local radio that it’s not national, it’s not global, and it is transitory. Yet you also feel that it is important, even if it’s only that it’s important to you. I got my lifetime belief that the show comes first from working in local radio, I got my whole sense of time as something to fill and use with pace and rhythm from it, to this day I think about the top and the bottom of the hour because of radio. I cared about that work so overwhelmingly much that there could be no other thought about no other thing while you were doing it.

In the seconds talking with a producer before she put me to air, in those ten seconds, I could hear the exact same care in her voice. I recognise what she’s asking me about is really her checking sound levels, listening for the line quality and being sure I’m not a nutter, I recognise the procedure but more than that, I recognise the atmosphere of the entire studio.

I can point out that today the BBC bows to political pressure like its being bullied in a schoolyard. I can despair at how it always reports strikes by focusing on disruption instead of the desperation that strikers have been driven to. And I could cry about the whole thing of artificial balance, where the BBC won’t have an economics expert say Brexit is going to be bad without then giving equal time and weight to a tosser lying that it will be great.

But those few seconds before I was on air talking about how great the BBC truly has been over the last century, those few seconds reminded me of exactly why the BBC truly has been great.

My contribution to the BBC is barely a single pixel in that century, but the BBC’s contribution to me is life changing.

It’s sobering to now be someone being phoned by BBC Local Radio instead of being one of the people doing the phoning. It’s sobering because I don’t know how that happened, it feels like I was just there making those calls a few days ago, and I think that maybe I miss the me from those years ago. Not sure. I don’t want to go back, but for a brief instant to be handed a slice of what used to be, and to somehow get to represent the whole BBC for one moment, was special.

Don’t tell

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There is a moment in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein that I think is all the more exquisitely well done because it doesn’t happen.

Helen has placed a lonely hearts kind of ad in the newspaper — this was 2002, there were still newspapers — and has had a couple of phone calls in response to it. So we’ve got how it works, what’s supposed to happen, and we’ve also been set up for half a dozen other issues that will play out over the course of the film, but the kicker is how perfect the setup is that takes us to the point where Jessica phones Helen.

Except she doesn’t.

Or rather, she must do, but we never see it. We are delivered to this moment when the call is certain and then we’re with them on their date. Despite the eleventy billion people telling you that showing something is better than telling it, this film is better because it does not do that.

I wouldn’t know from watching the film, but apparently the budget was very low and very tight. So it’s possible that there just wasn’t time in the schedule to shoot that phone call. But I think it was the decision of writers Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. They also star as Jessica and Helen respectively.

I do have a thing against characters asking questions in drama, but I’ve not had a problem with showing things instead of telling them. But don’t tell. Don’t show, don’t tell, don’t ask. Not all the time, not when it isn’t necessary.

All of which seems obvious now I’ve written it down, I mean I can see you nodding, wondering when I’m going to get to a point you don’t already know or can’t already see.

But maybe what I’m thinking is that this phone call that we don’t see really works because of everything that leads up to it not happening, and everything that results from it. Much as I just singled out one tiny moment in a film, maybe you just cannot do that.

All of this is on my mind because I’ve just rewatched the film, and I’ve just rewatched it because I read that this year is its twentieth anniversary. There’s a lot being written and said about it, and I can’t decide whether I’m more startled that it’s two decades or that anyone but me knows it.

Kissing Jessica Stein is one of those films – or books, TV, radio, theatre – that intellectually you know has been seen by millions, but it feels like it’s only yours. I’ve never been in a gay relationship, never had the string of bad dates Jessica does, never lived in New York, yet a chiefly lesbian romcom set in Manhattan is mine.

I can see that I am drawn to yearning, I’ve spotted that in other favourites like Hearts & Bones, and I am definitely a romance fan. Even in a comedy, the stakes in a romance are so tall that I think all romances are secretly thrillers.

And some of them have great titles. I just don’t know why I think Kissing Jessica Stein is such a good title, I don’t know why that is what made me watch it on TV close to two decades ago, but I love that I did.

No show

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I have a thing for words and phrases that mean two things and preferably opposite ones. The famous example is the word “cleave”, which can mean to pull apart — and can mean to push together. Another is “sanction”, which can mean approve or can mean disapprove, as in the military action is sanctioned by the UN, but a country’s unsupported army attacks will see it facing sanctions.

Apparently there’s also personne, which in French means either a person, or nobody.

But my personal favourite is the word “through” and I think of it during every results show in Strictly Come Dancing. Following the dance-off part of the contest, the better couple is through to the next week. And the other is out of the competition. They are through.

There is one such term I don’t like, however, and it came up this week. No show.

Someone was a no show at a workshop I was running a few days ago, and because of that, I came within a pixel of being required to cancel the event.

I can’t detail the reasons why it came so close to cancellation, nor can I tell you why it was down to this person’s absence. But I can tell you that if the audience hadn’t already started to arrive, I have no doubt that we would have cancelled.

As it was, the decision was taken to carry on and I know that was better than cancelling, but I also know I didn’t do a great job. I was distracted by a problem that this person’s absence meant continued through the session and I don’t offer that as my excuse, I offer it as my fault.

You’re nice, so you’re now wondering if something stopped this person coming, if there were a problem. I am not wondering this because I wondered it the month before when she also was a no show but for various reasons it wasn’t remotely as much of a problem. You’re clever so you’re now wondering why I relied on her this month then, and I did have a fear going in that she might not show, the organisers and I did have that fear and we did have some possible solutions.

But the solutions were workarounds that in the end couldn’t work around it, and this person who didn’t show up and didn’t send a hint of an excuse, had insistently said beforehand that she’d be coming this time.

It’s not like I can imagine working for me is some great writing opportunity for anyone, but working on this particular series of workshops is. For me, too. It’s privilege to get to do it and while I know I won’t be asked forever, I also know that it will all have to be torn from my fingers when I do have to stop.

Maybe I’m projecting here, but I have a suspicion that both you and I let opportunities go. I suggest that in our case it’s because we don’t see them, or we don’t believe them, and I am adamant that in your case and mine, it won’t ever be because we commit to something and are then no shows.

Relax, don’t do it

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I have no clue what you do to relax but that’s fair enough, I don’t have the faintest notion what I do either. Yet for some reason, and who knows why, just lately I’ve been worrying about it. I’ve been conscious that I don’t know how to do this relaxing thing. What with one thing and another, it could be 5am when I start work, then 8pm before I sit down to dinner and I spend the rest of the evening wondering what to do.

I did fall asleep in the bath the other day.

I’m not interested in work/life balance, I don’t see them as two different things because everything I’ve been able to take everything I’ve ever enjoyed and make it be part of my work. Hmm. I am interested in how saying that 5am to 8pm bit sounds simultaneously like a boast and a whinge. Either way, it’s not good, so let me reassure you that the real problem is that I’m getting so little done in that time.

Although this is relaxing me, actually, writing to you right now. You’ve got a look in your eye and I’m warily wondering where you’re going to go with that, but talking like this is definitely relaxing.

Also reading, that’s good. I read a script every day and yesterday’s one was utter bliss. I can’t tell you what it was because I got it through a job I’m doing but it was an 45-minute TV script so, being a fast reader, for about half an hour I wasn’t in my office, I was in Derry in the 1990s.

Just thinking it through, that was also about the 11th hour I’d been in front of a screen yesterday. It’s startling how you can physically be in one place, physically using one Mac, and yet it feels like every hour is completely different. Scriptwriting, video editing, article writing, project management, watching a snippet of TV over a very fast lunch, audio editing, research, and countless conversations over email.

I say countless, the truth is that there isn’t that much, I just don’t count it.

Somehow I also don’t count it as work, nor as relaxation. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea of what the word means. I might ponder that, although some fifteen years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things. To this day I wonder what she really meant.

Maybe I should just relax.

What I swear by

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If you’re going to swear in a drama, I think you should do it really early on in the episode. This is just a thought, obviously, but the only time I ever notice swearing is when it is in a drama and specifically when comes in late.

Well, there’s the famous scene in The Wire which has two detectives saying “fuck” in every possible connotation, expression and meaning, but after the first five or ten fucks you’re no longer watching detectives, you’re hearing the writer having a good time. And you do have to be a little conscious that Veronica Mars would’ve figured out the crime scene and be off again around an hour faster than these two.

I don’t tend to swear in real life and my problem with The Wire is not that it had swearing, it’s how the swearing in this specific scene broke the delicate little bubble that a drama lives in. There’s a moment in Star Trek: Picard where someone describes Jean-Luc Picard has having a fucking cheek, and it’s perfect. First swearing in 700-odd hours of Star Trek, and it’s perfect because she would say that, he did have a fucking cheek, it was actually a pinprick bursting a different kind of bubble and it’s possible that I may even have cheered. Certainly it helped me get into the story.

But although I remember that coming quite a bit into the episode, I also remember that it was one of the first things this particular character said. And I think that matters. To me, anyway.

There’s no special reason for why I don’t tend to swear, it’s not that I think I’m a family show or that I fear you’ll be shocked. I just don’t care about swearing and you wouldn’t, except it has caused problems. Countless times – okay, not very many but I definitely didn’t count them – a friend will, it seems to me, suddenly stop talking and apologise. It’s always because they’ve just sworn and they’ve somehow recognised that I don’t, but it’s also always, invariably, inescapably a mystery to me why they’re stopping.

If I had noticed the swearing, I wouldn’t care, but the reality is that I haven’t noticed. Now I sound like I don’t listen. But most of the time when people swear, it’s like small punctuation rather than some raging use of strong language. I am all for strong language, language should be strong, language is strong. So “Where did I leave my sodding keys,” just isn’t up there for strength.

Fine. That’s true in drama as well as real life, and my noticing Star Trek: Picard was less because it was the first swearword in – hang on, I can check this – yes, in 56 years of that show. It was more because it was right.

Only, I was watching a drama for work this week when, I think, about 15 minutes in, the lead character said “fuck”.

And it was not right. It jarred.

Apparently I can take it when an admiral curses at Starfleet Command in the 24th Century, but I can’t when a contemporary inner-city UK police officer does.

But it was wrong because, I think, it was said more for effect than anything else. There’s no way to know these things really, but I had such a strong sense that it was said explicitly to tell us that this was proper, grown-up drama.

And if you need to tell us that you’re proper, grown-up drama, well, you aren’t. Maybe that was really my problem here: this show that I am not naming felt like it was daytime drama. It didn’t seem as cheap as those have to be, but there was something, there was a patina that shouted daytime TV to me. It had this added patina of being contrived and somehow constrained, and it was also missing something.

It was missing the intangible something that makes you forget you’re watching a show and instead get into it.

Maybe if the show had been better I wouldn’t have been stopped and made to think all of this. As it was, more characters then swore at what felt like carefully negotiated intervals after that, and it was all too late. I had the sense every time from there to the end of the episode that when a character swore, what they really said was something like “Fuck that, look at me, I’m swearing, this isn’t daytime TV you know, this is great, be impressed”.

Children swear as they try to sound adult and you have the sense that they know the sound of the words, but not the meaning. That’s what I got here.

It’s not as if there can or should be a rule about anything, but I just wonder if I’d not have been so annoyingly knocked out of the story if the character had sworn at the start of the episode. I wonder if it would’ve helped us know her. And I’m quite sure that doing it this much later rather detached the swearing from the character and made it sound like an editorial decision, debated over by the writer and producer and director.

Obviously I can’t swear to that.

B-E-I-D…

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“You’re part of it now.”

The now late Shirley Rubinstein, wife of writer Alan Plater, said that to me ten years ago. My book with the long title, “BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair” was just coming out and Beiderbecke meant more to her than it did even to me. “The Beiderbecke Affair” is a 1980s ITV drama by Alan Plater and both he and Shirley have told me that it, plus its sequels, is really “Alan and Shirley having adventures”.

This is a case of maybe you’ve heard of “The Beiderbecke Affair” and maybe you haven’t. But it’s also a case where if you have heard of it, if you do know it, it’s something personal to you, you don’t think anyone else has heard of it. It isn’t six one-hour episodes that were a hit watched by millions, it is two characters, Trevor Chaplin and Average-Sized Mrs Swinburne, it is two friends of yours.

More than two, there’s Big Al and Little Norm as well. Later on there is the character with my favourite name in the entirety of television drama: “Peterson – the Man with No Name”.

Even this week, someone said that they thought they were the only person who knew this show. And for some years after the book came out, I would be contacted by Beiderbecke fans who thought exactly the same thing. One of them sent me a Google map with all of the show’s filming locations marked out and he seemed so pleased that I’d be as interested as he was in it.

Right from the first showing in 1985, “The Beiderbecke Affair” had this way of gluing you to it like a fan, but also cocooning you in the story, in the Beiderbecke world, like it was just you, Jill and Trevor, not millions of others.

Watch it now – a peculiarly edited version is on BritBox and they won’t tell me why they’ve cut the bits they have – and I think it’s still seductive. It’s a drama series in which nothing seems to happen, yet not because it’s a piece of Sunday night light fluff. I suppose it’s gentle, but again that’s now a pejorative word for me and brings to mind empty dramas where the baddies always get their comeuppance. Alan Plater wrote once that he preferred dramas to be about people being, living, not thrown into melodramatic situations. Beiderbecke is a slice of Jill and Trevor’s life, and it’s only by the end of six episodes that you really register just how very much has happened.

Six episodes. With ad breaks, that’s considerably less than six hours of television drama and I’m still writing about it 37 years later. Quite right too.

Shirley was obviously aware of the impact of the show, she’d had the fans and the letters. I’m proud of the fact that – although I’ve forgotten how this could possibly have come about – I am the reason Alan Plater got a fan letter from Chris Beiderbecke, grandson or later of the musician, Bix Beiderbecke.

When Shirley said I was part of it now, I felt so proud. I can see her saying it to me, holding a copy of the book.

“You’re part of it now,” she said. “Whenever anyone looks for The Beiderbecke Affair, whenever anyone even just Googles the word ‘Beiderbecke’, your book will come up.”

“If they can spell Beiderbecke,” I said.

The long and the short of it

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A friend is talking about giving up on a script because it’s telling a true story and there is just too much detail to get into it. Easy, I said.

It’s always easy when it’s someone else’s script.

But still, a story isn’t a document and if you want to convey truth, it’s better to make the audience feel than to brief them on every detail. I have believed this all my life: journalism is about the facts, drama is about the truth. The first half of that belief has taken a bit of denting lately, but I’m as sure about the latter as I am that I can’t stand those dramatic reenactment scenes that pad out some of the poorer documentaries.

I need more from dramatised true stories. I don’t mean I need added sensation and, this is a separate issue, I do mean that it’s amazing how bad the acting is in those documentary scenes. I’ve got to let that go.

Anyway.

The problem with a script that’s too long is that you cut it down. Sorted. Rather than just deleting every second page or something, just find the key part of the tale. Find the one part of the story that captures what you want, that conveys and communicates and connects with whatever jt is that made you so keen to tell this tale. That makes you want to tell this tale and not that one, that made you keen to spend at least hundreds of hours working on it.

It’s up to you to find that one line and I can’t help you because it’s your story, your connection. And besides, my current script is running too short.

In my case, I have this piece that I just look forward to writing each morning, to spend an hour in this world that is forming around me. It’s what I’ll be going to the moment you and I are done. Only, this script should come out to be an hour long and instead I’m eating up story like it’s chocolate. At the moment, I’m on 23 pages and I think it’s going to wrap up in about another 10.

Plus unfortunately the 10 includes two to three pages of necessary stuff that I require, that is fun, but the only place it can go is after the best point to end the script. I don’t know what to do about that, except that I do.

The friend with the script that’s too long and me with the one that’s too short, we still both have things we have to drop.

I won’t underestimate the difficulty my friend is having. I will underestimate the difficult I’m having. But still, even if neither of us is having it easy, even if actually neither of us has a producer waiting for this yet, even if both of us are writing for ourselves at the moment, this is all a nice problem to have.

As with any script, what I’m going back to writing in a moment and the other side of a mug of tea, may never get made. But I’m enjoying being in this world instead of our real one, and I can actually see how a previous script that was commissioned has taught me something I need for this one.

We get better by doing. I can’t see an alternative to that and I can see that it’s something I should apply to everything.