A word with you

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I’ve always known dialogue is revealing, it’s one of the reasons I love dialogue, which is out and out the reason why I’m a scriptwriter. The words one character uses to describe another, for instance, do hopefully do their job and give you a mental image of who they’re describing, but the very same words at the very same time also illuminate the first speaker.

For example, I could say right now that I think you’re clever. That’s a fair description of you, fine, but what it simultaneously tells you is that I’m observant.

The one word, “clever”, is not some special word, not some special code, it isn’t anything where you feel the line of dialogue is contrived or unnatural, it’s just a word to describe you — which happens to do this little bit of describing me, too.

What’s been brought home to me this week is that sometimes it only takes one word. One word can describe someone, it can convey a tone and atmosphere about a group of people, it can change your mind.

One word can be like a light switch.

There’s a Facebook group called “Old Pics of Brum”, and as it’s about my hometown of Birmingham, UK, I liked this group. Lately it’s been very active and I’ve been actually looking forward to the latest images, yet now I just skip any notifications like I haven’t got the heart.

Not since a friend, the writer Claire Bennett, mentioned that the group had removed one of her old pics of Brum for, ostensibly, not being an old pic of Brum even though it is in fact an old pic of Brum. You can see why they’d be confused. Maybe there’s more room for debate than I think, since I haven’t seen the image, since they’ve removed it.

Only, in talking about this, she also mentioned that separately she’d commented on some other image whose description talked about “ladies” and she had pointed out that they were women. She got told she was pedantic and I don’t know what happened next, but you know they didn’t change ladies to women.

And ladies is the word.

You do get many people saying “ladies and gentlemen” at the start of speeches but that’s practically become a meaningless series of syllables, an automatic utterance like the way “dulcet tones” is said by people who have no clue or interest what “dulcet” actually means. Or how so many such speeches have “and with no more ado” at the end, spoken by people who could not possibly tell you what “ado” is.

Frankly, I want some more ado. Give me lots of ado.

Outside of this kind of automatic sentence fragment, though, when someone says the word “ladies”, it is illuminating. Or to be fair, chiefly when it’s said by a man.

If a man comes out with the word ladies in a sentence, he’s at the very least telling me his approximate age. If he also decides to tell me that he knows how to handle the ladies, I know that he doesn’t and that he’s quite likely to be still living at home with his parents.

You just know, for instance, that the pathetic tossers who edit Wikipedia to remove biographies of women are men and that they are the kind of men who say “ladies” more than they ever say “women”.

The one word conveys a whole mindset to me, a mindset that believes women are another species instead of half of the same one as men. Whether it’s “ladies” in general, or one specific “lady”, the word is such a filter over someone’s description that I’m not sure I even register the rest of the words. I know I don’t think a man is describing a woman correctly. I do think he’s told me all I need to know about him.

“Ladies” is the turn in the conversation where you know you’re done. It’s a walk-away word.

I haven’t quit that Facebook group over the word. They might chuck me out if they read this. But I’ve walked away from it so far that I won’t even notice if they do.

Ringing the changes

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I don’t think people know how to use phones any more.

Quick story. It’s some time in the 1980s and I’m in a producer’s office, pitching him a factual idea for BBC Radio 4 that I’d called “555”. It was about the then little-known fact that every telephone number uttered in any American film or TV show began with the area code 555. Today you’d make a YouTube video about it and about how America’s Bell Telephone Co reserved that whole code for filmmakers, but back then I had a good case for also finding the UK equivalent, looking into the stories of what happens when shows use real phone numbers instead, and so on.

Back then, in that office, though, I am also there when the producer’s phone rings precisely as I first say “555”, and when he answers but there’s no one there. Back then, this kind of dead call was rare enough that he hung up the receiver and said that it was surely a sign that we should make this show.

We never did.

Anyway. Today, yes, I get three or four dead calls a day. I know that I can block them on my iPhone but only in such a way that I also block calls from people offering me work, so, you know, I put up with the dead calls. Incidentally, I’ve learned that if I pick up and do not say a word, a huge proportion of the time, they hang up. You can’t imagine me not talking. Thanks.

That aside, I know you just pictured me picking up my iPhone and putting it to my ear. Or you definitely pictured the 1980s producer picking up the phone receiver and holding it to his.

And that’s what I see changing. Maybe it’s just a greater awareness of my surroundings post-pandemic lockdowns, but now I seem to see a lot more people talking on their phones as I walk around outside – and none of them put those phones to their ears. It’s now always, always, that they hold the phones out in front of them and are using the speakerphone.

I’m not saying this is wrong, it’s just that it’s like the sudden majority don’t know there used to be this thing about holding it to your ear. Sometimes it’s like they don’t want to hold the phone that closely, it’s like they are staring at this device in fear of its witchcraft and/or post-Brexit roaming charges. Sometimes they’re tweeting while they talk and sometimes that leads them into a tree. Or sometimes they’re on video calls and I like video calls, I’m just a little less keen at staring up someone’s nose while we talk.

But it’s now so common to see phones used being this way that if you do see someone holding a phone up to their ear, either they are old or you are in a film.

I know mobile phones killed off a lot of cheap tricks in drama, like the ominous slow pan to the ringing hall telephone seconds after the hero has left on what we know is probably not a fatal errand but we’re supposed to think that this week it just could be. Or when characters are trying to call each other at the same time so the lines are engaged and that’s it, we’re on our own now.

I also know that mobiles have opened up new drama possibilities, like saying you’re in one place when you’re in another, or being tracked by which cellphone towers your call goes through, or Android phone users being able to call for help while iPhone ones look for a charger.

But I didn’t know how the use of phones has so visually changed.

Or maybe I just don’t know why so many people now believe I must hear both sides of their conversation. Look, you were on a break, okay?

Channelling writers

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I didn’t think this was going to be about me. Two days ago, I was asked a writing question that I didn’t know the answer to, and yesterday I was told the answer by writers who do. That was it, I was solely a conduit, a channel, passing a question one way and an answer the other, and I was very happy to do it.

Only, of course conduits and channels cut into the land and of course rivers reshape that land as they flow. I’m not saying I’ve been dramatically changed, but I’m also not as unaltered as I expected.

Here’s the thing. The question came from a friend on behalf of someone else, someone I don’t know, and the question was to do with this someone else being known. She’s from what I’m told is a pretty strict religious background and family, and her writing examines issues that pretty strict religious backgrounds and families think will go away if you don’t write about them.

Through this friend, this woman wanted advice on how to get published yet insulate herself from being discovered by her family. And the answer came back from Room 204. This is a writer development programme run in my region by Writing West Midlands and my getting on that about ten years ago was possibly the single most useful thing in my career. The programme is only supposed to run for a year, but a decade on, it’s still helping me and an ever increasing number of writers.

Some of whom gave me practical advice to relay back to this woman, others of whom made suggestions that are supportive and useful, and others of whom emailed me privately to make recommendations. All of which I’m sure will help, all of which I’m relaying back, all of which I am grateful for.

But.

I am also left thinking how fortunate I am that I don’t have family or society pressures stopping me writing what I want.

But.

I do.

We all do.

There are things I don’t write about because they’re just of no interest to me at all, and there are things I don’t write about simply because they never occur to me. But if I’m completely honest, I’m not completely honest: there are things I do not write about because I am afraid of the reaction.

I do know that on the three or four occasions I’ve written about these things anyway, the reaction has been startlingly positive, like I’ve tapped in to something that connects us. Which would be what writing should do. And obviously I also know that I’m just wrong to presume that I’ll get any reaction at all.

But I do hold back and unlike this woman I don’t know, maybe most of my inhibitions are self-inflicted.

I should write about these things. We should all write about the things we are afraid to.

You go first.

Voice control

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I was told this week that a character I’d written was clearly my creation, my type of character, and yet simultaneously also straight out of an Alan Plater drama. It was meant as a compliment and I took it as high praise.

Partly, actually, because one of my favourite things about Plater’s writing was when he dramatised Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War books. Watch the series, read the books, it’s clearly Manning throughout and yet the TV series is also simultaneously in Plater’s own voice too. I cannot fathom how he did that.

But I can fathom voice. I used to be proud of being able to adapt to any house style, any requirement, and now, not so much. I’m not proud of it and I don’t think I can do it anymore. Not when I now so cherish how a friend once recognised I was the writer of a particular piece, even when the job had required me to not sign or byline it. That reminded me of the radio broadcaster Fi Glover: the first minute I heard her on air, I knew who it was because I’d read her book.

She writes the way she speaks, which is fantastic and damn hard and may not be the only way to write but I have such a fondness for it that I think maybe it should be. Perhaps just on weekdays.

There’s also that I know, from direct experience, that you can encourage a writer to find their own voice but until the day they do, they’re as likely to have no clue what you even mean. Maybe we all start off trying to write like our favourite writers and maybe there just comes a day when you say sod that and write like yourself, but there comes that day, and there comes your voice.

Only…

I think the start of writing is finding this voice, but I worry that the end of writing is holding on to it too tightly.

This week I came across a few pages of The Golden Age, an unfinished theatre play script about 1960s British television. It may be that only those few pages were ever written, because I can’t find any trace of a full play being performed. I shouldn’t tell you who wrote it, but if you read it, you’d recognise the voice immediately. Just as you’d know it was a theatre script, even though at no point does it say that, or anything like it.

Suddenly, I’m wondering if I’m wrong and it was an unfinished TV script. I don’t think so. Plus, incidentally, the 1960s weren’t the golden age of television, we’re living in the golden age now. But I reckon that the play was started somewhere in the early 2000s, so the writer wasn’t to know.

It’s fine. Good gags, a wry and very clear opinion, but it’s the same opinion as in this writer’s other work. And though the specific words of the jokes are different, they’re really the same. The same kind of setup and the same kind of payoff, the same type of character making the same type of point.

Look, it was never finished so maybe this writer thought the same as I do.

But it’s like when you watch an Aaron Sorkin drama. There’s never the slightest pixel of a doubt who wrote it, and there are a thousand points to love and relish, but he has a very precise voice, he has a particular shtick.

And while his writing is so good that I have watched and many times rewatched his Sports Night comedy despite caring even less about sport than I know about it, it’s also so good that it stays with you. And consequently, I couldn’t watch his The Newsroom series, even though I really tried.

The trouble for me is that while the lead character in that, Will McAvoy, is apparently very good, I could never quite see him through the crowd of previous Sorkin characters standing in his way. This line sounds like Jed Bartlett from The West Wing, that one is clearly Danny Tripp from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and this is unquestionably Will McAvoy quoting Casey McCall from Sports Night.

In Sorkin’s case, he does also repeat stories between shows, which doesn’t help. A couple of characters in different series discover their father has been having an affair for decades, for instance, and a window gets startlingly smashed by someone in roughly identical situations in Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60.

There’s also the, to me, totally riveting issue of a man pursuing a woman. In Sports Night, you’re rooting for the two to get together. In Studio 60, the same story is creepy as hell.

So there is a difference in Sorkin’s characters, but again, you always know it’s him.

I think that’s great. I think a clear and strong voice is exciting and is so different to all the could-be-by-anyone dramas.

Only, his voice gets in his way for me, at least with The Newsroom. And on a rather smaller scale, I worry that having long found my own voice, it’s become too locked in for my own good.

Dimmer switch

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I think you and I can be sure of two things. First, you know that there are stupid people in the world. Second, I cannot know whether I’m one of them or not.

But I can know when I’m being patronised. Such as last Monday, cooking in the kitchen, listening to a live album recording of a reunion concert, the name of which I am never going to tell you. Most of the time, the album just kept making me wonder if the music was this bad 40 years ago, but at one point I was patronised.

It’s not a great album and it doesn’t sound like it was a brilliant reunion concert, but there is no possible question that the only people who went to it on the night are fans of the original. Maybe also a few sorry plus-ones. But the plus-ones aren’t going to be converted into fans for the night, they are the designated drivers, they are the bodies filling up the arena and making the acoustics right.

For the fans, these are live reenactments of songs they’ve either cherished for decades or, like me, used to like a lot and are treating the night as a tunnel back to their slightly embarrassing teenage years. It’s unlikely that there is a detail they don’t remember, and if they’re putting up with these flat versions, they’re not going to storm out because one tune is slightly less well known than the others.

And yet there it is. One of the many performers gives us a version of a raucous song with as little feeling as if he were reading instead of singing, and then says “You know that came from X, right?”

Okay, he didn’t say X.

But I know where it comes from so now I’m standing in my kitchen, giving him a Paddington stare.

He wasn’t to know that I would have sharp knives with me when I listened, nor could he possibly guess that he did this to me three days before Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban did it worse.

JK Rowling wrote the book, I suspect you’ve heard that, and Steve Kloves wrote the screenplay. But I am certain, groundlessly but entirely certain, that either Kloves did not write one specific line of the script, or he did it faced with a gun and a cut in his fee.

Azkaban is the one where our heroes go through a horrible experience, then go back in time to the same moment and put things right. It’s the one where on the first time through, ‘arry Potter is rescued from death by who he is certain is his dead father somehow come back to life to do some magic.

And it’s the one where the next time through, when Hermione has taken them back in time, that we and ‘arry realise the saviour is Harry himself. It’s moving and effective, and I think the whole film is excellent.

But.

We’ve seen this scene from both sides now. We’ve seen it because of Hermione. We cannot, just cannot fail to grasp what has happened in the story unless we are either dim or are watching while writing on Twitter. Cannot. If there is one thing more certain than our being fully aware of what happens, it’s that so is Hermione. She was there. She was right there, and it’s her time-turner device that enabled it all to happen.

And yet there it is. Leaving the scene, ‘arry explains to her what happened and I am wincing, until he ends his with explanation with “does that make sense?” and now wincing is not enough. In that moment, I did not believe I could be more patronised.

And yet there it is. Hermione has to say “No, it doesn’t.”

Hermione is that rare thing, a character in drama who is clever. She’s also that un-rare thing of a clever character who is often derided for moving the plot along while we are supposed to be with the less clever yet somehow more heroic and admirable others.

“No, it doesn’t” does serious damage. Three words and what they tell me as I am shunted out of the story, is that someone in the production worried that the dimwits and the inattentive will feel bad about being dim and inattentive, unless we have a character tell them it’s okay.

It’s not okay. It also doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to, either. People who were inattentive two minutes ago are not going to be any more attentive now, and I offer that since “No, it doesn’t” comes something over two hours into the film, the dimwit element will have lost the plot and stopped viewing quite some time ago.

Instead, what it does achieve is showing us that Hermione is stupid. You can tell us over and over that she’s the cleverest, as this film and the others in the series do, but no, she isn’t. Here she is, right in front of us, unable to understand something she witnessed, something she enabled, and then unable to comprehend a painfully simple explanation.

She’s the best character in the series and she gets shot in the face by this one line.

All of which is on my mind because a couple of weeks ago I was accused of assuming too great an intelligence on the part of my readers of some article or other. I don’t know that’s true, I don’t think I can ever know it’s true, but I can know that I’ll take that, I’m fine with that.

Exorcise regime

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You’re never too old to learn something, fine, but apparently it’s also never too early in the morning, either. For it’s not 08:00 yet as I write this to you and already I’ve learned something vital today. I’ve learned that the bins aren’t collected as early as they used to be.

If you heard the words “oh, no” at 07:08 today, it was me. Reaching for the kettle, thinking about you, freezing with a hand on a teabag when I remembered the bins need to be out by 06:00.

Fastest bin-putting-out-ing I’ve ever done. And now, with that kettle boiled and you right here, there’s no sign of the bins being collected yet. I know what you’re thinking but I checked: the neighbours’ bins are out and haven’t been collected, it’s not that I missed it.

It’s that I forgot because I was away. Sitting right here on my couch, barely even wearing pyjamas, and with nothing but a pint of water next to me, still I was away. Can’t tell you where yet, but wherever it was, I was there in a script. Today marks 71 days since my BBC Radio 4 play was destroyed – I’m learning French on Duolingo and every single sodding fucking day it tells me how long it’s been since the play died on my 1,000th day of Francaise. Anyway, after 71 one days, you can tell I’m quite clearly over this career low, but I can tell you that sometimes I’m doing better than it seems.

Such as for an hour sometime between 05:00 and about 07:00 weekday mornings. I’ve only been doing this for a week or two now, but I’m writing a script that steals the essence of the failed radio play. It steals the essence, I think it may even improve on it, but what I’m certain of is that it can’t be stopped the way the play was. No one’s waiting for this script and the odds of any one project getting made aren’t gigantic, but Alan Plater had this nice line in “Misterioso” about keyboards as weapons. A piano player is in a kind of musical fight with a trumpeter, and points out later that he won because he can play ten notes at a time. “Kept eight for myself and used to two to insult him. You only need two fingers to insult anyone.”

My keyboard is QWERTY and I don’t want to make it sound like I’m picking a fight over the consonants – I’m not a vowel-ent man – but I’d be okay if my punctuation were interpreted as revenge. I’m quite disciplined about the regime of clearing time before the rest of the day’s writing work, it’s just a bonus that I’m exorcising some radio demons as I go.

More importantly, for my politeness and mental well-being, I’m now 41 pages into a TV script that cannot be blocked by legal issues, cannot be stopped by anyone. As I say, no one’s waiting for it either, so don’t let me get carried away, this might be rubbish and it may never be shot at all. But right now, for these weeks, that doesn’t matter, if it ever matters at all, because this is mine.

It’s got so that every night for a week now, I’ve actually been looking forward to the morning and to climbing back into the world within this script. I try to write for just one hour, and that hour can be anywhere between 05:00 and 07:00 depending on when I can make myself get up, but today it was all the way between 05:00 and 07:00, it was the full two hours, because I wasn’t here, wasn’t on this couch, I was away in where the script is set.

People who want to be writers because they want to go to the Oscars and be as rich as JK Rowling, well, they haven’t paid attention to how writers are treated or how we fare, but they are also missing out on why writing is the best job ever created and then some.

I wish this happened more often, it’s actually quite rare for me, but these moments like today, when you’re in your own script so deeply that you forget the bins, there’s nothing like it. The closest, perhaps, is when you’re reading a superb novel and its world is enveloping you, except you are creating that world, you are pushing it along. It feels like you’re inside a small and delicate bubble and if you press on the sides just right, you expand it out to where it needs to be.

Where it needs to be is about 80 pages and right now I’m on page 41. I do not know what can possibly go on page 42, I do not have the smallest pixel of an idea what will go on there. I want to find out, and I will early tomorrow morning, but then I also don’t want to reach the end. I want to stay in this script.

I want to stay in it today, too, but I know that however good or bad my script is, it’s better if I limit it. Write until you drop and, well, you’ve dropped. Write until you have to put the bins out, and then you leave it in a good place, you’re in a good position to pick it up fresh tomorrow.

It’s not rare that I get absorbed in the writing, but it is rare that lose myself in a piece this much. So maybe the lesson I’ve learned today is that writing, whether I’m actually doing it well or not, is everything I want.

Alternatively, it could be that I’ve learned the bin collection schedule has changed and I could stay in bed longer.

High yearnings

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I need to write a character who is yearning for something and I don’t seem able to do it. I also need him to be stupid but that’s easier, I’ve got form on that, not to mention a mirror.

Possibly I’m a bit fuzzy because right now, I mean exactly as I type this to you, I’m rather hoping that my COVID self test is going to turn out okay. I’m quite keen that it does, of course, a little anxious since I just was in a school talking with 150 people and am now feeling a bit rough, but still, that doesn’t feel like yearning. I’d appreciate your sticking with me for the next 15 minutes, however. Let’s talk so I don’t keep watching the clock.

The other night, I rewatched the first episode of “Hearts and Bones” by Stewart Harcourt. It’s so long since it aired back in, I think, 2000, that it practically counts as a first watch. But if I remembered very little of it from back when I must’ve reviewed the preview tapes for BBC Ceefax, what I knew in my, well, heart and my bones, was that it is achingly full of yearning. Some deeply hidden, some overt, all painful and all real. I need exactly that for this thing I’m trying to write.

You keep being told that characters in drama must want something or it isn’t drama, and I would go off on one there about how I understand this is a very Western view of dramatic form and there are others. Mind you, I don’t know the others. Shorter conversation than I expected.

If Western is all you can write, and now I suddenly see you wearing a cowboy hat which you are frankly pulling off better than I could, then I know that it doesn’t really matter what the character wants. They just must want it and if they get it immediately, the story is probably over. There’s a bit of me that wants to think bollocks, you just have to find a better story for immediately afterwards, but the principle isn’t wrong. Want something, blocked by something else, there’s at least the start of a story and, most importantly, the start of a character.

“Hearts and Bones” leads off with one character, Emma, longing, yearning, for another, a man named Rich, who happens to be her boyfriend’s brother. Dervla Kirwan plays Emma and I’m not sure she’s ever been better because Harcourt gives her moments of silence where the depth of feeling she portrays will squeeze your chest. I wish I could read the script.

Maybe it helps that she wants something specific, someone specific, but really she doesn’t. I mean, she does, but as well as the pull of attraction to this man, there’s the push of wanting, needing to get away from her life being the way it is. So it’s a specific, definable desire that actually embodies a vague, indefinable need.

I’ve realised that I don’t fully care whether my character gets whatever this nebulous thing is he wants. I’m not being coy or secretive about what he needs, I am really just struggling to vocalise it. Odd how it can be so clear in my head and yet what’s clear is that this overriding desire is something impossible to grab hold off and define.

Perhaps that’s the difference between fancying a particular man or woman and needing something impossible to define, to imagine, maybe even impossible to get. If all that happened in “Hearts and Bones” was that Emma fancies Rich, it might be soap, it wouldn’t be drama.

Okay. I see what you’ve done here. You’ve realised that I am yearning to write yearning. Smartarse.

If nothing else is clear, though, my COVID test is. Thanks for holding my hand.

Making a drama out of a book

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This might be the single most obscure piece of contract trivia you hear today, what with all the many pieces of contract trivia you come across every week. What could push it over the top into being the most obscure, though, is that it’s possibly also wrong. It definitely used to be true, though, so please give me that. And it’s this.

There is or was a financial difference between adaptation and dramatisation.

Strictly speaking, if you are hired to turn a novel into a TV show or film or theatre or radio, you are dramatising it. You are taking it from the page and bringing it into a dramatic form.

Adaptation is taking something from one dramatic form and turning it into another, or more recently, turning it into another version of the same thing. The 2021 film of West Side Story is an adaptation of the 1961 movie, which itself is an adaption of the 1957 stage musical, which is itself an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from just a little bit before then.

As I say, I don’t know if there is still a difference in how much you get paid, but the job itself, the reason there are these two terms, that’s definitely still true, they are still definitely very different.

Dramatisation is like improv in how everyone new thinks they can do it. I’ve never done one, although at times I’ve pitched things: I’d like to see Margery Allingham’s Campion novels dramatised again, for instance, or James Blish’s Cities in Flight. Not because I think they’d be easy, not because I know I could do them, just because I want to watch, to spend more time in the worlds those authors created and I want to bring them to new audiences.

All of which is on my mind because I’ve been waiting all week for the next episode of Slow Horses on Apple TV+. Based on the book by Mick Herron, it’s dramatised by Will Smith, one of the writers of The Thick of It and Veep.

The show is made by See-Saw Films and I talked with them about a thing last year. It didn’t happen to work out, but along the way they told me they were making this and it sounded good, so from curiosity, I read the first novel in the series. Then the second. Third. Fourth. All of them. I’ve forgotten how many there are, they’ve rather run into one since I read each so close together, but they are very good, and I think that over the years, they have been badly misrepresented.

I mean in how the novels have always been described in articles about the books. Every article, every interview with author Herron, it all says that these are comedies about inept spies and that is so far from the truth that I sometimes wonder if I’m reading the same books. It reminds me of Brian Fremantle’s Charlie Muffin spy novels. ITV presented that as being a comedy, but you watch the Euston Films production written by Keith Waterhouse, and it is more tense than anything. I don’t just mean more tense than funny or anything else, I mean it’s also more tense than, say, James Bond ever gets.

Slow Horses has that tension. It is about these MI5 spies who’ve been banished because they did something so bad that they can’t continue working in the field, but not quite so bad that they could be fired. And some of them are indeed there because they did stupid things. The books are funny, sometimes laugh aloud funny, but the laugh is often a surprise in the middle of really fraught, tense, quite scary action.

I also began wondering whether the TV dramatisation would actually be a comedy, not just promoted as one, truly being one. I’ve read scripts before where on the page I’ve found them stark and tense, then on screen they manage to be that plus somehow a lot funnier. Maybe I was missing the gag in Herron’s novels.

Yet the strengths of the Slow Horses books for me, the reason I keep coming back for more, are partly that the characters and the story are compelling, but also that everything balances on this sliver of a knife edge between action and drudgery. The Slough House setting is oppressive in the books, quite vividly deadening, and held back from total shut-the-book boredom by solely the thinnest of lines.

I’m freelance so it is a very long time since I worked in an office, yet still the Slow Horses novels capture for me the atmosphere of a dreadful office on a worse day and the feel of it is like stupefying inactivity in 3D. Then suddenly – but, significantly, also naturally – there will be these moments of great action and suspense.

So just enough boredom to convey the purgatory these characters are in, just enough action to keep you compelled, the novels are remarkable for holding this tone and these changes so well. It’s really an accomplishment how the novels keep you believing this central idea that nothing happens at Slough House when, over and over again, a huge amount happens there.

I’m less keen on how too many characters in the novels are clearly based on familiar ones from other spy or crime stories. Not all of them, by no means all of them, but for instance there’s one recurring character who the moment you read about her, you know is Connie Sachs from Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy. More specifically, she starts out as the Beryl Reid portrayal of Sachs in the BBC dramatisation.

And then there is the lead character, Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman in the TV dramatisation. Reading the novels, there’s no mistake: Jackson Lamb is Andy Dalziel from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels. Author Mick Herron has said so, publicly, and I didn’t need him to, it was that obvious.

I don’t think it is obvious in the TV show. Now you know, you’ll see if it you know the earlier character, but I think Will Smith’s dramatisation has done him better. He’s done the drudgery versus action superbly so far, too, and he, director James Hawes and production designer Tom Burton, have also conveyed that horrible Slough House building so well that we are intimately clear on even its very geography.

What I’m not sure about yet is whether Smith has done Roddy Ho well, or whether anyone actually can. Ho is the Slough House hacker character and in the novels, he is a joy because typically segments about him are in the first person and Ho believes himself to be a god amongst men. Herron shows us mortifying moments where Ho is embarrassed and even punched in the face, but does it through Ho reinterpreting those events as if he’s the hero. When people go quiet around him through revulsion, for instance, internally he’s crowing about how they are clearly awed into silence by his brilliance.

Again, it’s a great gag and the greatest thing about it is how Herron can keep going back to the same well and utterly delighting you every time.

But it is strong because it’s first person internal monologue and I don’t know if Smith can bring that out. In the first two episodes, I think he’s done a clever job of conveying this stark difference of opinion about Ho, between what Ho thinks of himself and what everyone else thinks of him, but maybe that’s the most that can be done.

I’m not watching this to study it all, though. Just as with the novels, I tried the first one out of curiosity, but I’m hooked, I’m watching this show because I like it enormously.

In fact, mostly I’m now waiting for episode 3 to find out what happens with Sid Baker and I’d like you to explain to me why I’m so anxious about her when I’ve already read the novel this is based on. Plus the – wait, let me check – grief, seven more novels after it. An eighth comes out later in 2022 and I’ll be having that.

Slow Horses, the TV drama by Will Smith, is the same story, literally the same story, as Slow Horses, the novel by Mick Herron.

The difference is, it’s been dramatised.

The good, the bad, and who’s fault it is

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You know the way that music appears to slot into decades. A 1970s song is unmistakeable from a 1990s one, for instance. Clearly that cannot be true, there is no possible way that all musicians get together to decide on a style to last from January 1, 1990, to December 31, 2000. It’s our perspective, imposing this division by decades, it has to be.

And yet it’s also definitely true.

I’m minded of this because I think a lot about how no writing, from songs to drama, can be entirely divorced from when it was written. That would presumably be because no writer can be, either. But for me, it’s been an issue of degrees. All shows are of their time, but some seem it more than others, and some continue to stand up well despite their age. That’s the phrase, that they stand up well despite being old. But films and TV don’t actually age, they are frozen in the moment of creation and it’s we who age around them.

So when I wince at something I’m watching from the 1980s, perhaps it’s blameless and I’m the one who has aged.

The reason this goes around my mind a lot and the reason I listen to this little storm in my head is that I’m usually wondering about something I’m writing. I can’t see or appreciate what it is about it that’s later going to seem so obviously bound to today, but I also can’t see whether the piece is any good or not. I can’t see whether it’s me making it good or bad, or whether it’s leaning so much into its time that it’s nothing to do with me.

For instance, there is music I like perhaps less because of itself and more because of the time it connects me to. There are a couple of tracks by The Eagles that I think are musically quite remarkable and I feel their undertow, I feel they are somehow right and good. But then I listen to an Eagles album and think it’s rubbish. The songs I know from way back when are enormously better than the songs I don’t know from way back when, but which were written and made exactly then.

Possibly I just like the band’s hits. Yet I have wondered whether there isn’t any such thing as objectively good or bad, whether it’s the luck of what time and place the piece connects audiences to. Connect enough people and you’ve got a hit.

But then I rewatched Oliver’s Travels last week.

It’s a 1990s five-part TV drama series by Alan Plater and I strongly suspect it’s really a six-part drama but nobody could make it to the end. There is some poor direction, there are excellent actors in entirely the wrong parts for them, and if it doesn’t scream 1990s to me very loudly, it’s because I’m more deafened by how it yells Alan Plater.

Everything I relished about my friend’s writing is right there in Oliver’s Travels and not one pixel of it works. He told me about problems with the production and there isn’t an actor, a critic or even just a viewer who doesn’t instantaneously realise the piece was poorly cast. But it just isn’t written well and if it’s hard to see that – not to mention hard to say – then for once you can look beyond direction and casting and the whole production because Alan’s original Oliver’s Travels novel is rubbish too.

Sorry, Alan.

But it’s a good thing. It tells me to shut up about drama being bound to the time it is written in and it tells me that the key part is not time, it’s written. If it’s not on the page, it isn’t ever going to be on the screen.

And it’s writers who put it on the page.

Fifteen minutes of fume

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I know Microsoft does this, Microsoft has a weekly email that tells you something or other about your wellbeing and your computer use. I don’t know what, exactly, I have never done anything but delete it instantly and briefly wonder if there was an unsubscribe button.

It’s Microsoft, there won’t be.

Apple is as bad. Apple has this thing called Screen Time where each week it tells you exactly how long you’ve been using your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and what apps you were in. Sometimes the total number of hours is up on the week before, sometimes it’s down, never can I do anything about it. I used what I needed, I did what I needed, get off my back.

But.

The one that makes me so ticked off that I appear to have blocked which particular technology monolithic corporation does it to me, is one where I am encouraged to read for so many minutes a day. Like reading is good for you and that’s why you do it, that it’s a health and fitness thing rather than just bloody reading because it’s great.

No machine is ever going to tell me I should read for 15 minutes every day and I will not ever have any machine pat me on the back for doing it.

Only…

About a week ago now, I tried adding something to my To Do app’s daily routine. Read for 15 minutes. If there’s a time set for it, I don’t remember, it’s not a calendar appointment, it’s something to do. Strike that: it’s something I want to do.

So it isn’t that a reminder pops up at a certain time or that there are fireworks when I do it. It’s not that there is this 15 minute block, it’s that I’ve made reading part of my day. It’s on a To Do app, but really in this one case it’s on an Excuse for Doing It app.

There are fewer than half a dozen tasks I have to do every day but I do them every day without fail and have done for many years. I wouldn’t and I don’t think I can add many more to the list, but popping reading on there means that at some point in the day, that’s exactly what I do.

And as well as the “Read for 15 minutes” being on an Excuse for Doing It app, it’s also bollocks. The 15 minutes part. It’s never just 15 minutes. Not because I have some awkward rage against all machines, but because starting something, even something you really want to do, is tough. So much easier to do the next job, especially if it’s for someone else.

So hang on, I can work some of this out. I think it was a week ago that I started this so call that 7×15 minutes. In theory I’ve read for 105 minutes.

In practice I have no clue and no care – but I finished a Star Trek novel that’s been on my desk for months and I also re-read Jane Austen’s Emma. I don’t know if this has made me healthier, I only know for sure that I had a good time.

I’ve been a bit in my head lately and there are better heads to be in. Such as Austen’s, now I think of it. So tomorrow when Screen Time pops up, I will dismiss it with a shrug like I always do, and on Monday when Microsoft bothers me with this crap again, I will growl a bit.

But I might do both over my shoulder as I read.