Seeking out strange new worlds, and liking them

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Funny. I used to explain that for me the one-hour television format was as vital as the three-minute pop song was to so many others. But then the so-many-others dwindled to the point where the phrase three-minute-pop-song became vaguely factual instead of totemic.

Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 “Born to Run” helped that happen, incidentally. Its 4’30” running time was one of the first songs to show US radio stations that tracks didn’t have to be three minutes or under to be hits.

(Mind you, US radio stations are weird. For decades they had a rule that you couldn’t play two songs by women in a row. No rule against men, play those all you like, but a woman’s song followed by another woman’s song, nope. Listeners don’t like it, listeners can’t cope, and listeners will tune to another station.

There is no way in which this is sane and no way in which it is good. Except that it is specifically the reason Sarah McLachlan created the Lilith Fair concerts in the 1990s. The concert albums that resulted remain some of my favourites.

US radio didn’t learn its lesson, incidentally. Rather than doing anything interesting, they fixed the problem of listeners switching stations by making every station identical, and by having the same firms own every station. Switch if you like, it’s the same music for you, the same bottom line for them.)

Anyway.

Music and television. If no one but me uses the three-minute phrase to describe anything today but boiling eggs, still there is a connection between music and TV. A connection and a parallel.

You know the story that Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” has just become a number 1 hit 37 years after it came out, and that this is down to the TV show “Stranger Things” playing it.

I see your 37 years and raise you 57.

In 1965, a pilot was made in the States about the voyages of a starship and in 2022, that pilot went to series. Fifty-seven years. Six decades. I know that as a species, we writers think decisions take a long time, but, come on.

As soon as you read the words “these are the voyages”, I think you know what this is about. If I mentioned that you need to go places boldly, that pretty much certainly nails it. And beyond adding “strange new worlds”, you just need to hear “starship Enterprise” to be totally certain you know the show.

But that pilot episode of “Star Trek” wasn’t the same show that got on the air, limped along, died, and became a pop culture behemoth with, what, a dozen feature films and as many different TV series. That pilot episode was canned and legend – honestly, there’s legend on this – is that it was because it was “too cerebral”. Viewers wouldn’t like it, viewers wouldn’t cope, viewers would change channel.

You can see that pilot episode easily enough and god help us if that’s what counted as cerebral in 1965. I was born in 1965 and I swear I could’ve grasped that pilot even then. I can imagine me all pink and hot, lying there in my first cot and gurgling “yes, yes, it’s all an illusion created by those aliens, we get it, and why don’t the women characters have anything to do?”

The show got a second pilot where it was turned into the series you know, love, and/or are at least aware of. Captain Pike was out, Captain Kirk was in.

And now, 57 years later, Pike is back in.

That 1965 pilot called “Star Trek” has now gone to series as “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” and it came to the UK this week as Paramount+ launched here. Three episodes of the show are available in the UK so far, I think ten have streamed in the States.

It’s not cerebral. But it is very good. I tried out the first episode and the next thing you know, I’ve seen all three. I tried out the first episode to see how it worked, to examine how a 2022 production would claim to be set ten years before the 1960s show.

That was what was fascinating to me, that’s why I was drawn in. There is all the production side, and I understand there are Star Trek fans who think the sets should have been made to look exactly like the 1960s show, but then there are always idiots. It’s a long time since I saw any of the original Star Trek, yet you watch this new show and it feels like they’ve got it right.

This is how the USS Enterprise looked in the 1960s, it just wasn’t done as well as it is now. These are the characters from the 1960s, they just weren’t done a fraction as well then as they are now.

That’s what changed this show for me, changed it from an intellectual — possibly even cerebral — curiosity, into a series I just want to watch because I enjoy it.

I have to put some effort into ignoring the 1960s-style haircut that Captain Pike has, but otherwise I’m already deep into the story. Except when Nurse Chapel is on and I cannot fail to marvel at how finally, finally, six decades finally, she is given something to do.

You can tell me about the differences in filming style, or production, or direction, or special effects, and I am interested, but it’s the writing that matters. These old characters are new because they are written so much better.

Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s unfair to say that a 2022 television drama is better than a 1960s one. We are all a product of our time, and my time is 2022, so I would prefer it.

Only, the argument has been made that Running Up That Hill is a 1980s song in form as well as simply fact. That it is a product of its time, that it was made using very specific synthesisers and styles of back then, and consequently it is dated. Bollocks to that. It was a favourite of mine then, it’s deeply powerful now, even though its writing literally has not changed one note in between.

Star Trek’s writing had to change radically for that old show to work sixty years later, but it did, and it has, and it does. Dammit, I’m going to have to stick with Paramount+ after the free trial ends, just to see what happens next.

Streaming services. Subscription television. It’s a strange old world.

Right now, wrong then

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I should have seen this one coming. Usually if someone changes my mind about something, they do it quickly and I can never see things the way I did a moment before. This time, this week, that did happen, but it was less a new idea, more a confirmation of what I now realise I’d been working towards.

Previously… I used to believe that a story idea belonged in the form you first thought of it. If you thought of a radio play idea, then trying to do it as a novel was contorting it. It was contrived, it was wrong. The idea, the story, and the form are all part of the same thing, I believed, and if you change any part, you are going against the grain of the whole. If you want a TV idea, go think of one, don’t distort a stage story.

The person who changed my mind this week didn’t listen to all of that and then conclude that I was talking bollocks. But she did disagree and she did point out why.

And I was left with nothing else to say but the truth: “Then I’m wrong, aren’t I?”

I don’t want to let go of the opinion entirely, except I do. Maybe I just want to hang on to how I think the medium is important.

This woman’s entirely persuasive examples were centred on dramatisations of books and how interesting it is to see the process of bringing something to a different form, of how it naturally brings out other aspects, how it gives other opportunities. The example I gave back to her was the same. Slow Horses is better on television than it is in the original books. Screenwriters Will Smith, Morwenna Banks and co haven’t lost any of the strengths of the novels, haven’t changed anything, but have made it richer somehow.

But then five years ago I had a chance to do a short stage version of a radio play that I’d been struggling with. Struggling so much that actually I only finished it last month. Central to the many problems was a certain point where I needed one character to encourage another, but they physically and literally cannot meet. I think my ultimate solution in the radio script is a bit of a fudge, but for stage, I just had one of them walk by the other and whisper.

Didn’t matter that it was physically impossible in terms of the plot. It was right. The stage format allowed me to let that happen and it was right.

Similarly, I have a new stage play that comes from a TV idea and theatre lets me do things television never could. That story must start simultaneously in two time periods and for TV, I’ve made one winter and one summer to give it a visual start to the difference, before you then separately piece together just how many years apart they are.

For theatre, I put my characters on a train and had a train guard announcing to one “arriving London, 1987”, and to the other “next stop, Hull, 2019.”

“Seems a long journey,” says one of my characters.

“Try doing it standing up,” says the guard.

A small warm exchange and a simple, direct telling the audience what’s going on, but also done in a way that gives you a flavour of what’s coming next. Using an aspect of theatre that is pure stagecraft, that would be out of place on radio, out of joint on television. Using the form the story is being told in.

Sometimes you can still be contorting and contriving as you move between forms. But now I think the medium is only part of the message.

Writer soluble

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This is the week that my first BBC Radio 4 play was supposed to be broadcast. It wasn’t, for the undeniably sound reason that the entire project died after it was written and before it was recorded.

You can tell I’m over it. Sometimes I am, but it was hard listening to Radio 4 on Tuesday this week, although the play that replaced mine was good.

Only, every weekday this week, last week, and for about two months now, I’ve spent an hour hiding away from everything by writing various projects just for me. Well, ultimately I hope they’re not just for me, but right now nobody’s commissioned them, nobody’s waiting. There’s just me, for one hour, somewhere between 05:00 and 07:00, depending on just how late I worked the night before and/or how lazy I am.

And that 60 minutes has become something I look forward to.

It’s not easy, and yesterday’s was especially hard, was especially like trying to dig an escape tunnel with a pencil, but even that was a help. For an hour, I am in various worlds I am creating, with various voices in my head and, because it’s quite early in the morning, without anything else going on at all.

I feel like I climb back into these worlds. And if Tuesday’s script happened to feature more swearwords than I knew existed, well, at least the writing wasn’t bland.

The waking ally

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So lately I’ve been watching Doctor Who from the start and earlier this week I got to a 1964 episode called The Waking Ally. I’ve seen it now and I cannot figure out who the waking ally is. So very, very foolishly, I looked it up.

It’s days later and I’ve spent a ludicrous amount of time delving into Doctor Who trivia. And as a consequence, I’m experiencing what I can only describe as double-decker nostalgia. Two layers of nostalgia. I’m apparently nostalgic for a moment when I was nostalgic.

For in October 1964, around the time of this episode I’ve just watched, the cast and crew of Doctor Who had a party in the Bridge Lounge at BBC Television Centre. They were there to celebrate having made 50 episodes.

And thirty years later, I was there too.

It’s not as if I stood there, too scared to mingle, too young and timid to interrupt Verity Lambert talking with William Hartnell. But it felt like that’s what I was doing. Just for a few minutes, I sat on the side of a table in that room, quite possibly where they had sandwiches three decades before me, and I listened closely to nobody’s conversation, I heard nobody give a speech.

And now, today, there’s no Bridge Lounge.

It’s gone in the sense that this part of BBC Television Centre has been demolished, but scarily also in the sense that I couldn’t remember quite where it was. I used to walk by it every evening I worked there, every time I headed for the restaurants. But I have a 1950s architect’s sketch of the building and I’ve been staring at it, completely unable to identify the Bridge Lounge.

Brilliantly, however, Google Maps documented the building before it was demolished and I’ve just been using that to walk around this deeply beloved place. And despite not remembering where the Lounge was, not being able to pinpoint it on a map, “walking” through the building, I went straight there.

It even looked as if I met me coming back.

TVC in Google Maps has ghosts like that figure all over the place, but frustratingly, it isn’t complete. In this case, it stops just short of where I want to go now, where I went before. It takes me up to the bridge part and there’s a sign over the entry saying Bridge Lounge, but it won’t let me go further along that part or then left into the room itself.

But zooming along up to that point, racing faster as I realised that I was right about where to go, I could taste the air in that corridor.

I’m nostalgic for the atmosphere you can’t see, for a party I was thirty years too late for, and in a building that no longer exists.

I still don’t know who the waking ally is, but I’m grateful for the journey he or she has sent me on.

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.