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.

Tower of Babble

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I have no religion, no faith, and yet some distant spiritual history came up into a script I wrote this week. Short version: nothing ever leaves us and everything comes into our writing at some point. And as soon as I say that, I’m thinking that there is a truth I hold self-evident, which is that I am not telling you anything you don’t already know.

Still, I’m so devoid of faith that it surprised me. You don’t need to know the details and I expect there’s a coffee, tea or alternative beverage that will be more worth your time just now.

But since I seem to need to tell you, here’s what happened. I do a weekly YouTube video for writers who use Macs, iPhones and iPads, that kind of thing. This week’s “58keys” happened to be the fourth time I’d tried recording this one and that wouldn’t matter to anyone, except the three failures taught me something relevant to the topic.

So the fourth version was also a rewrite, and the new script included the phrases “three times… something” and “three times more… something.”

You could watch, but it’s quicker if I tell you: I unthinkingly wrote and performed those words in my best Biblical preacher voice. True, you have to be told this because it’s not a very good best Biblical preacher voice. Yet without fully remembering the root of the words, I had the sense of them and it got into the writing.

Not enough so that I’ve looked up the original, mind. Someone denied someone three times and this is definitely bad, I was taught, though my schoolboy brain was probably focused on what pressure the denying person was under. Like the way a fella – this is religion, it’s always a fella – had reason to doubt something and has since been pilloried over it for two thousand years and counting.

Considering it’s supposed to be all about forgiveness, religion can’t half hold a grudge.

I wonder if I’m sounding at least brusque for how I’m repeatedly saying I don’t happen to have faith. I also wonder if I just want to hang on to you for a minute more, to natter on for little longer before getting down to work.

Let me do this. Let me tell you that there are three things that I do believe, that in fact I believe with a passion that could shake walls.

I believe that we are better when we work together. I get that not everyone agrees there, or we wouldn’t have Brexit now, and we wouldn’t keep getting this incendiary bollocks about immigration being anything other than great.

Then I also believe that it is better to be crew than passenger. I’d rather work my passage than be waited on.

And lastly, I believe that the show comes first. As I’ve got older, I’ve become a lot more careful about projects and work I take on, but if I’m doing it, it’s going to be done.

Which doesn’t really tally with how seconds ago I admitted that I’m using you as an excuse to stay babbling rather than get down to work. Okay, you got me there. You’re harsh this morning. Harsh, but fair.

I’ll get on with the day now and that’s the truth. Gospel.

I drove by my childhood last night

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Didn’t mean to. I did have to mark an occasion of sorts yesterday, but that was for later. Mid-evening I was driving to a familiar place through a less familiar route and at unfamiliar time.

Also, there were quite a lot of roadworks, including one set of temporary traffic lights that caught me outside what is now a Subway, but was once a bank. Through dusk and red lights, I could just see me going to that bank as a boy. It wasn’t to do any banking, you’re not looking at any kind of fiscally responsible man then or now, but instead it was part of the very best and certainly the most elaborate school trip I got to go on.

No, not part. Whole. That was the entire thing, a geography trip to this bank. It was a trip that in round figures was a stroll, easily contained within a single lesson. But last night, I could again see why we were marched off to it.

For down very low on the bank’s wall, where thirty of us once had to take turns crouching down to see, and where last night I had to sit up a bit to see over a bollard, there is a crow’s foot mark. It’s an Ordnance Survey marker, and it’s to do with establishing a base line in order to measure the height of hills and buildings.

Before I could remember what height I would’ve been back then, traffic moved on now and – perhaps not surprisingly – I was then driving by my old school. We didn’t get on, my school and I, but there is something about it still being there that is practically haunting.

As there was with this. The reason for the new route was that I was required to pick up a fish and chip supper. The chip shop I was directed to turns out to be very proud of the fact that it opened the year I was born. The year is on signs and everything.

So for every minute I have lived, for every thing I have done and thought and said, this chip shop has been a living business, a going concern, and for a moment it felt like it had been expecting me for all these years.

That’s probably not why a woman working there said “Sorry for the wait”.

Much later last night, I marked this occasion that I needed to mark and if I did it without looking back quite as far as school afternoons, still it was a whole bunch of looking back. I did this thing by watching Alan Plater’s “Doggin’ Around”. You can catch that on YouTube if you look in the right corners but – get me – my copy is from the BBC’s own archives. Which doesn’t sound relevant, does sound suspicious, but turned out to be poke-in-the-eye relevant for literally every second of the film.

For the BBC archive’s viewing copies of shows from the 1990s are effectively ROTs, Recordings of Transmissions. You don’t just get the show itself, you get the continuity announcements either end because BBC just recorded the whole output and later chopped it up into the shows. So it’s like you’re back watching on the night.

Except BBC archive viewing copies also have a timecode burnt in. I’m used to that from preview tapes, but this was not a clock showing the running time, it was a clock and a calendar showing exactly when “Doggin’ Around” aired. Precisely.

It was on BBC1 starting at 22:06:30 and on, it says here and throughout the film, the date 16-10-94. Ended 23:36:17.

By chance, I watched it at pretty close to those same times now, 27 years, 4 months and 26 days later. I watched it now on an iPad in my bath and simultaneously, it felt, in 1994 on a Mac in my rented London flat where I appeared to live on pizza bread, waffles and sweetcorn.

At about 23:36:18 on 16-10-94, I know I phoned Alan Plater to say how much I had enjoyed it. Three decades later on 10-3-22, I know I wanted to phone you to say the same thing.

But.

I’m also really not ready to look back in quite so much detail. It seems that the past can be a more lovely place to visit than I’d have thought, but, god, I don’t want to live there.

With or without a timecode.

So let’s you and I consider this as occasions marked and moved on from. It’s time to do something new.

So anyway…

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Previously on Self Distract… my BBC Radio 4 play died. I didn’t tell you much more than that, partly because I was trying to be brave – I know it didn’t look like it, but you should’ve seen me when the news broke – but also because I just can’t tell you very much at all.

Nonetheless, I’ve been emailed and messaged a lot about what I did say, which just convinces me all the more that you talk about you and me to everyone. As it turns out, too, what everyone wanted to ask was the same:

1) Did I have a commission?

2) Can I use the play in some other way?

Yes, no,

I had the commission, we were in fact due to be recording the play next Thursday and it was going to be on BBC Radio 4 on June 7th. I had a small but all-star cast, an astounding cast, a really amazing cast.

But it died before we could get to record it. +

Anyway.

I have also had three pieces of good advice that I want to tell you in case they’re of use to you as well.

The very first good advice I got was when I was asked “so what are you writing today?” As in yep, the play is deep-friend toast and it ain’t ever coming back, but what are you writing now? That was pretty good.

Second, strip the play for parts. That’s not as possible as you’d think and yet actually, I’m frustratingly pleased with that. I believe the play would have sounded light and relaxed on the radio, but the more you poke at it, the more tightly wrapped it all is. Unstitch this bit at the start and that bit at the end falls apart.

I think that’s great writing, I can’t believe I pulled it off. But it does also mean that for the moment, I think there may be just one single exchange of dialogue that can be lifted out and that can just about work on its own.

But yes, damn right, I’m having that. Not one single clue where, but I’m having that.

And the last thing, which is possibly my favourite. Writer Gail Renard told me to subtly alter the names of people who killed the play, and then put them in a bloody murder story.

As I say this to you, I realise I’m not sure if bloody meant gory or just, you know, very. And I presume she meant a murder story, as in fiction, not a murder as in a newspaper story.

Probably best to check that.

Broken

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My BBC Radio 4 play is dead. Not my fault, not the BBC’s fault, and I can’t ever tell you why. It’s dead and by chance it died on precisely the 1,000th day since I began researching it.

There is no upside, there is no bright side. It is devastating to me and I see no chance of anything positive coming from the situation.

The same reasons that mean I can’t tell you why mean I also can’t ever explain this: it was the best thing I have written to date. Writers are supposed to dig deep and I went archaeological on this one, but I also had to go sideways. Nothing, not one single thing, about this play is remotely like anything I’ve written or tried to write before.

I mean the bones of it, the structure. I wouldn’t have even guessed that you could tell a story in this way, which is very likely a failure of my imagination. The story dictated it, the story drove it in this direction and in this form. I’m minded of Gromit laying track as the train races on, and so many times it all felt as frantic as that.

There were mornings when I’d wake up either sweating or shaking because the play was in me and it was that important. The chief reason I wrote it was to see whether it was physically possible to write it, and whether I was capable of doing it.

It was and I was, and I am proud of it. I’m conscious that my pride is just rather pointless.

I’ve said and thought before that nothing you write is wasted. That idea is being rather tested now, but still I do see that I’m a better writer for having written this. That isn’t enough. But it’s something.

Belonging

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Here’s a thing I did not expect, wrapped up in a lot of things that I did. The lots of things I expected are all to do with how this week, last Monday in fact, there was an awards night. The 29th Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards.

I was expecting these lots of things because, in a small way, I’ve been working on the event for close to a year. There were no Guild awards in 2021 because of the pandemic, and this year’s took more planning and more continually changing around than usual, also because of the pandemic.

There was one part I can say was me. I just told you it was the 29th Writers’ Guild Awards. Up until this one, each annual event had been titled with the year in the name. So the last one I did anything for was the Writers’ Guild Awards 2020. Or it could’ve been called the Writers’ Guild Awards 2019 because the ceremony was in January 2020 but it was celebrating writing done chiefly in 2019, and anyway, it was pre-COVID so there’s no chance of remembering.

It was definitely a confusing name, though. It got even more confusing in the planning of this one: the first question was whether these latest awards should honour writing over the last two years, or just sod 2020 and move on. We decided to celebrate both years, to not be beaten by having had to take a year off.

But then the question was whether to call it the Writers’ Guild Awards 2020-2021 or something like that. It was me who said we should drop the years and call it the 29th Writers’ Guild Awards. Okay, I had to find out from Nick Yapp, who wrote the history of the Guild, what number it was, but I am the one who said it should be the XXth Writers’ Guild Awards.

So that’s four words, if you count the number as a word. And all through the night when those four words were on screen, I got a bit ridiculously pleased with myself. At most three other people knew I’d thought of that, and if any of the three remember all this time later, I’ll be ridiculously surprised.

Anyway. Proud of four words.

Imagine if I’d been up for any of the awards.

Other than that, though, it was just fun and a privilege being a little part of the organising group. Seeing clever people at the top of their game, it is brilliant.

So is the night. I tell you, the best evenings I’ve ever had have been at Writers’ Guild Awards and so of course I now expect them to be fantastic. Last time, I wrote dialogue for Hartley Hare. This time, I met Paul Chuckle.

What I also expect, though, is to feel flat afterwards.

Only afterwards. Never during the event itself. The sheer volumetric pressure in that room is so happy that you cannot feel flat. Well, maybe if you don’t win an award you’re nominated for. But the sense of support and even happiness from the whole room for each writer who wins, it is joyous.

I just expect now to feel flattened around a fifth of a second after I leave. There have been some years where I’ve made it an entire second, but only when I’ve walked out with someone.

Because usually I come away with a sense of how all these superb writers, every one of these people you’d like to be just as much as you’d enjoy calling friends, each one is outclassing me as a writer. I would come away with that sense of them being better than me and it is in no way helpful to know that yep, I’m right, they are.

Come on. I just met Emerald Fennell, who wrote Promising Young Woman. I haven’t even seen her film, but I’ve read the script and right there on the page, her words left me shaking. Fantastic. She won for best screenplay this year incidentally, and I was embarrassed to realise she was sitting right behind me because I punched the air and yelled “YES!” when the result was read out.

So I am in a room of the finest writers in the land, I am completely conscious of that throughout, and it does not dent the joy – until between a fifth of a second and a full second after I’ve left.

It has got so that I expect this.

But not this time.

That’s the real unexpected thing. This time, for the first time, I did not leave there thinking I was the weakest, poorest writer. If you want to make a case that I am, I will not only nod in agreement, I will add my name to your petition.

I just didn’t feel it this time.

I felt good.

I felt I’d been where I belonged.

True, I need to write better, and also write more, and I would prefer it if I were able to write something good enough to get me nominated in the XX+1 Writers’ Guild Awards.

But I’ve found a place I think I belong.

Reading the boards

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I may have made a mistake. I’ve been reading scripts my entire adult life and since bothering to count from Christmas 2017, it’s been 2,289 of them. It’s not as if I’ve ever been unaware or unappreciative of how much producers, directors and cast do, yet very often if I’ve read the script, I don’t bother watching.

But then this week I watched the first episode of Guilt by Neil Forsyth. (It’s on the BBC iPlayer.)

I’d read the scripts as taut and frighteningly tense, and the transmitted version was exactly that – but it was also a lot funnier. It was played funny at points and played very well, barely any of which I got from the scripts. Same words, same meanings, just funnier when handled by a talented cast instead of me.

Similarly, while I was thinking about this, Britbox added Steven Moffat’s Coupling. I watched it and then the American remake too. If I had read the script, I wonder whether I would’ve got how funny it is. The US cast didn’t seem to.

While I’m on this line, I’m minded how in the early 2000s I read Ronald D Moore’s script for the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and shrugged. But I defy anyone to watch that mini-series and not be utterly arrested by it all.

I’m not saying that any one can make a bad script good. I’m saying that there are an enormous number of people who can read scripts better than I can, and a lot of them are currently treading the boards.

I’d best get back to practicing.