Why I left Radio Times

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I left Radio Times because they threw me out. Er, the end.

Okay, no, I say this to you and even one entire decade after I was chucked out of the Radio Times website and magazine, I want to explain that it was a budget thing. Some number of people had to go and it was so obvious that I was expendable at this particular point that I’d packed my bags at the start of the entire interview-for-your-own-job process.

That was the only bit I disliked and I’d actually forgotten it until I said that to you. Much as I loved Radio Times, that was telling me to take a typing test and that bit did piss me off. Even so, I’m not kidding: I knew immediately who would be kept on and who wouldn’t, and that was not from some fatalistic brilliance of mine, it was because it was that obvious.

Again you remind me of something. I say all of this to you and abruptly I can picture the room I was in when they told me. Mind you, this is also no startling feat on my part because the room was in the BBC Media Village and was one of the ones that had been decorated in the style of a BBC show. I was fired from Radio Times in the Doctor Who room. In fact, I’m a tiny bit unclear right now who the two people in front of me were, possibly three, but I am rock-solid clear about how I was sitting with my back to the TARDIS.

Which, if you discount the little detail that I was chucked out, is really why I left.

The actual ten-year anniversary is sometime in the middle of 2022, I’d have to figure it out to know when exactly, but it’s on my mind now because this week a colleague mentioned “The Writer’s Tale”, a book about the making of Doctor Who which I’d read before the aforementioned chucking out.

It is a very, very good book and was the idea of a Radio Times writer I don’t think I even ever met. Benjamin Cook. He asked Russell T Davies to email him about making Doctor Who and the result is – wait, let me check Amazon UK – 704 pages of immense detail. I expect it’s the same length on Amazon US.

Immense detail doesn’t cover it, oddly enough. This book is an oppressive whirlwind of pressures, even as it somehow manages to be joyous at exactly the same time. I remember reading it at night, unable to stop hours after my body was ordering me to sleep, and feeling this same intensity you get from nightmares.

God, it’s a great book.

But this Writers’ Guild colleague mentions it and that’s what put me back ten years or so, put me back in the Radio Times newsroom office like it was, well, not yesterday but no further back than Tuesday at the absolute most.

I can close my eyes and take you around that entire huge, open-plan space. I can point out where I usually sat. I can see in slow motion the moment when I once stood up and saw two identically-dressed people at opposite ends of the newsroom. And consequently realised at last that this is why I’d sometimes have a great chat with her and sometimes she’d blank me like a stranger.

Less embarrassingly and far more fascinatingly, to me anyway, is how I can also picture the precise angle from my usual seat where the office segued into the kitchen. Happy, cheery people would walk by on their way to get tea and at the same exact spot, once or twice they’d turn blood-angry. Like they’d been asked to take a typing test. Real anger, contained only by a desire to keep their job, and then at this moment no longer contained at all.

Always that same spot, always as they passed by me at this same angle.

I suddenly wonder if they just didn’t like me.

Anyway.

Last one. I can also picture-remember the different spot I happened to be sitting in when I was sneaking a few minutes to carry on reading “The Writer’s Tale”.

Again, sorry, fuzzy on the detail. This was some time before 2012, could even have been as far back as 2008 when the first edition of the book came out.

Whenever it was, the moment is vivid for me, the very feel of the paperback in my hand and the pages under my fingers, right here in my head like there’d been a flashbulb. All because of one moment in one of the email exchanges I was reading. Benjamin Cook had asked Russell T Davies about some particular decision in the making of Doctor Who and he’d replied with the answer. I want to say it was to do with casting, but forgive me, my flashbulb memory clearly has some limits.

The key thing, though, is that this was an email conversation. You’ve had a few of those yourself. So you know that every single one, every single exchange in the entire book comes with a date and time stamp. The day, the hour, the minute, that the email was sent.

And that’s why I left.

Because I was fascinated to read about this decision chiefly since I vividly remembered writing a news story for the Radio Times website about precisely that.

Only, I wrote the news story pretty much exactly one year after that email exchange.

I looked up from that page and for the first time, I was no longer where I wanted to be.

I now wanted to be making the decision, not writing about it a year later.

The end.

Okay, no. It should be the end. That would be the right dramatic ending: I look up, realise I don’t belong there anymore, and I get out. Instead, I take a couple of years to leave and I’m very much afraid that I might still be there if they hadn’t shown me a door and which exact side of it they wanted me on.

But really I was gone that day back reading the Doctor Who book. Maybe that was why it seemed so clear to me that it was right to chuck me out. I wish now that I’d left years before, but then I also wouldn’t wish away any of the time I spent there. So I wish instead that those years had been more compressed, exactly the way the decade since has.

I would hope for a great abduction story or something

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I’m not sure what 2021 was, other than not the year we expected after 2020. So I’m thinking of preparing myself for 2022 by only expecting it to be the 25th anniversary of the film “Grosse Pointe Blank” by Tom Jankiewicz, D. V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink and John Cusack.

Which makes it a quarter of a century that I’ve remembered and wished I’d written the film’s strapline: “Even a hitman deserves a second shot.”

And that I’ve also remembered this scene when Martin Blank (John Cusack) meets Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver) a decade after standing her up at their school’s prom night and vanishing.

DEBI: You tell me about yourself.
MARTIN: In California, travel around a lot on business.
DEBI: That’s it?
MARTIN: Yeah.
DEBI: That’s ten years?
MARTIN: Yeah.
DEBI: I would hope for a great abduction story or something.
MARTIN: I’ve had a few thrilling moments here and there.

It turns out I’ve had what I’d call a few thrilling moments in the last year and in the last ten years, too. Back in 2012, quite a lot happened to me. Radio Times chucked me out, for one thing, and BBC Ceefax closed down forever. I still think that was an overreaction. But, God, earlier this year we had some builders in and they accidentally took away my BBC Ceefax mug. The stun to my stomach when I realised was matched only by the relief when they brought it back the next day. A mug. I’m talking about a mug. I think you’re looking at one, too.

Anyway. Ten years on, sitting here writing to you, I realise I can’t entirely remember what happened with me and BBC News Online. That was always wrapped up around Ceefax and I’d long before lost regular work with that, so I think it just dribbled away.

Still, BBC News Online continues uninterrupted to this day and so does Radio Times. I can’t imagine how they’re managing without me. They must be being very brave. And BBC Breakfast could’ve interviewed many of them about Ceefax in 2012, but they interviewed me.

Those different teams –– RT, Ceefax, News Online – remain some of the best people I’ve worked with but the pleasure of that, the enjoyment of creative people at their peak, it was pretty much replaced for me in 2012 by Writing West Midlands. I can picture the first coffee meeting with that organisation’s Jonathan Davidson, and at this distance I can even feel my nerves as he wondered aloud about whether I’d be good at going into schools as a visiting author.

I officially became a full and proper author in 2012, too, as my first book came out. “BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair” (Amazon UK, Amazon US). It was important to me for a hundred reasons, it turns out that it was important to quite a few readers over the years too, and some day I hope to make back the advance.

It must’ve been such a strange year for me. Losing my biggest clients, effectively losing all of the work that had seen me living on the motorway between home and London. And at the same time sitting here, actually right where I am now, when the author’s copies of my book arrived. Sitting here holding that book in my hand and realising that no one could ever take it away from me. Good or bad, right or wrong, no one can un-publish that book. I’d done something I longed for and it was real.

Curiously enough, ten years on in 2022, I’m going to do something else I’ve longed for. I’ll have a play on BBC Radio 4 at last.

But that’s enough now, you’ve indulged my nostalgia far too much, you are far too kind. I recommend that you take my best wishes for your 2022 and go be you. I don’t recommend that you read on.

Because if I can’t really describe the last ten years beyond a few thrilling moments, I can detail 2021 and I’m afraid it looks very much like I’m going to. For whatever reason that deep therapy might uncover, I do tend to count things as I go and I also now appear to need to show you how many jobs I’ve done, how many scripts I’ve written, that kind of thing. I can’t pretend that it is in any sensible way useful to me so, frankly, there’s no chance it’ll be of use to you.

Yet I keep doing it and in dark moments, there’s something about the routine of logging this stuff, there’s something about how I can feel stuck and failed but, look, at least I did this, this and that number of those. It seems even more flimsy as I tell you about it, but we both know I’ll continue, so let me get this off my chest and, for once, hope you’re looking the other way.

In 2021, I did 1,853 jobs. I need to explain what constitutes a job. If you commission me for an article, that article gets listed in my Job Book. If that article requires me to interview someone, as happened a lot this year, then the interview is a job too. So it’s a lot less than, say, submitting 1,853 CVs to companies, but it’s also more than, say, just a task in my To Do app.

And I know that because my To Do app is the superb OmniFocus – which, incidentally, I apparently began using ten years and maybe six months ago –– and OmniFocus tells me I completed 7,722 To Do tasks in 2021.

Those jobs and tasks include writing Self Distract to you, of which this is the 52nd of the year and, counting on my fingers, totals something around 39,000 words. It also includes 31 workshops, 1 school visit, 12 Writers’ Guild regional newsletters, 7 appearances on BBC Radio, 242 newswriting shifts, and apparently 14 podcast appearances. That seems a bit low to me, enough so that I wish I counted better.

I doubt I’ll do it, I am reaching my level of anoraksia, but looking at the figures today, I also wonder about making more of a distinction between different types of job. Because I am close to having to guess this next: I appear to have written 1,221 articles for 4 companies in 2021.

I definitely chaired 3 panels, worked as a judge on 2 awards ceremonies, and read 523 scripts. I’m relieved to say that I wrote a few scripts too. Throughout 2021 I had various meetings that meant at least twiddling with an existing drama script, at most doing a small redraft. But I also wrote 5 drama scripts from scratch, which is possibly not overwhelming, but makes me feel okay.

Then there were non-fiction scripts. I write almost every edition of my 58keys YouTube series, of which I produced 60 in 2021 (a few aren’t going out until early 2022), plus this year I made videos for other companies, too. I think I made 6, of which 2 were scripted. Call it 66 videos produced, and 60 non-fiction scripts written.

There’s also a book, “The Blank Screen: Interviewing for Authors and Writers” (Amazon UK, Amazon US). That originated with about five hours of script I wrote in 2020 for a Udemy online course, but I’m still going to count it as 2021 since a book is a bit different and I appear to be more than a bit needy.

Maybe the thing I think I did best, certainly the thing I’m proudest of, is that I created a six-week-long Tuesday Night Writing Club and then later a six-week-long Wednesday Night Writing Club. That’s a total of 12 weeks and I adore that it is a total which is vanishingly small compared to the fact that both clubs have continued without me. Just before Christmas I was invited to join a meeting of the old Tuesday Night gang, and it is inexpressibly wonderful to see a group that were strangers before me are now deep friends after me.

On the less fantastic side, 2021 is also when term limits meant I had to step down as deputy chair of the Writers’ Guild. And workload limits meant I had to step down as chair of Cucumber Playwrights. And funding cuts meant the closure of the workshops from the Federation of Entertainment Unions.

But if you’ve read this far, let me finally shut up by admitting that in the entire year, I wrote just one short piece of fiction.

I would hope for a great abduction story, but no.

Plaque build up

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This is going to sound like a joke because it should be one, but it isn’t. That photo above is of me standing outside 25 Gay Street, Bath, in the UK. It’s a dentist’s.

You can’t just go inside without an appointment and I did try. Too much of a wimp to punch myself in the mouth, I did still do my very best to eat all the chocolate in the city. I tell you, I was diligent. Yet nothing worked and so the outside was as far as I could get.

And I was still starstruck.

Because 25 Gay Street, Bath, is one of the few surviving places where Jane Austen lived. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to stand there, nor really can I explain why it was such a thrill. By chance I have just started re-reading Austen, so the trip to Bath was well-timed, and she is a favourite writer for a dozen reasons including how swiftly vicious she can be, introducing a character and entirely destroying them in six words or so. But, still, I am rarely that starstruck and even more rarely by a building.

The problem is that you’d never know she lived there.

You have to already know and fortunately there is help. Just down the road at 40 Gay Street there is the Jane Austen Centre. Skip the oddly Benny Hill-like video that plays in one downstairs room and instead talk with the staff. There’s something incongruous about chatting away with a woman whose Regency costume only just covers her tattoo, but it’s a happy incongruity and all the nattering with the staff was my favourite part of the exhibition.

Not quite true. I knew nothing at all about Cassandra Austen, Jane’s mother, and now I know all I need from a poem of hers on display where three lines about a party she went to are enough to paint a picture of someone you’d like.

They came from Mr Bramston’s house,
With Madam, & her maiden Sister;
(Had she been absent who’d have missed her?)

It was funny hearing a laugh at intervals and knowing someone had just read to that point.

But, so, and. Here’s this Jane Austen Centre, set up in a house that is a minute away from where she actually lived and is presumably very like her place. Pop up the road to hers, though, and as I say, you will find a dentist’s.

You just won’t find anything else.

Not a sign, not a thing. Well, obviously there’s one sign or you wouldn’t know it was a dentist’s. And okay, there’s also “25” or you wouldn’t know which house was which. But there is not one single pixel celebrating, boasting or even vaguely acknowledging that Austen lived there.

It’s just wrong. I think of all the wit in her novels and this dentist’s office couldn’t manage one line. They presumably talk about plaque in that office, but they don’t have a blue one outside.

And they don’t even have a sign saying: “It is a tooth universally acknowledged…”

Ten favourite scripts of 2021

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I read these and didn’t have to. Wait, no, some I did: award shows are back so there were 30 or so scripts I was required to read. But other than that, so far this year I’ve read 500 scripts for fun and that number, plus it being mid-December, means I feel ready to recommend some reading to you, if I may.

Of those 500, 13 were stage plays, 20 were films, 43 were radio and a mere 424 were TV. What I can’t count or even really manage to guess is how many were written or made in 2021. I would have to say that the answer is not many at all.

This reading is done for pleasure and it’s as I find what I can. Some of the scripts are definitely new, but you also know how long it takes scripts to reach the screen so “new” can still mean a couple of years old. And then at least one script is from 30 years back.

So there’s no statistical analysis here, no rule or reason, no rhyme or plan. But I would like you to know that I found these ten to be immensely good reads. Just to avoid having any semblance of a countdown, let me split this all into the medium that the script was for.

Except for radio. There were a lot of really great radio drama scripts but only a couple that could’ve poked up into my top ten for the year –– and those were part of the judging I did so it’s awkward naming them ahead of the ceremony.

STAGE

Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Sweet Sorrow by Alan Plater

Neither is available online, I’m afraid. I got them from my bookshelves and you’re welcome to pop round.

I do keep a note next to each script I read, the very briefest of lines, ranging from “Okay” upwards and really only so I can look back and re-read the best ones.

Next to Fleabag, which I read on February 14, 2021, I’ve just written the word “Fantastic”. And next to Sweet Sorrow, read on November 4, it says “So good I cried.”

FILM

Promising Young Woman by Emerald Fennell

“Left me shaking,” says my note on February 1. “Wonderful.”

TV
Frasier: Dinner Party by Jeffrey Richman
The Handmaid’s Tale: Offred by Bruce Miller
Inside No 9: The 12 Days of Christine by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith
Press Gang: There are Crocodiles by Steven Moffat
The Queen’s Gambit (Episode 1) by Scott Frank
Schmigadoon! (Pilot) by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio
Stumptown: Forget it, Dex, it’s Stumptown by Jason Richman

Looking at that list, I think I might go for The Queen’s Gambit, read March 3, as the best. All I’ve written next to it is “So good” but of all the series here, it’s the one I wish I could read the rest of.

I’m surprised to see just how wrenching some of these are. I’d have said I read a lot of comedy this year because a) I needed to 2) they’re quite short and also, er, iii?) they can be so tightly written that it’s fascinating. But apparently I also found time on February 16 for The Handmaid’s Tale which was like reading a knife.

This is the year I finally got into Inside No 9 and I did so because of the scripts. I can remember laughing so much, so very much at A Quiet Night In by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, that I felt light headed as I read it on June 4. But it’s their The 12 Days of Christine, June 6, that sticks with me for how moving it is.

Still, speaking of funny, I was elated on September 19 to find that the script to episode 1 of Schmigadoon! was online. This is a musical comedy about comedy musicals and every frame is a loving nod to a genre of movie I did not realise I knew so well.

Seriously, every frame. And every note. The very opening sound of the first episode made me smile and I can’t say I didn’t stop until the end of the last episode, but it was pretty close.

Whereas Stumptown was upsetting on June 10 – but in a different way to the rest. It is a simply excellent detective series and so much so that you realise how rare that actually is. What’s upsetting is that the pilot went to series, the series is superb, it earned a second series commission –– and was then cancelled before production could start.

It was a scheduling thing and a COVID thing, and if I don’t know the details, I know it was pretty much a tragedy. You do not get great detective shows very often.

I look at my note next to Stumptown and how it just says “Excellent”. I am so good at conveying the worth of a script, clearly.

Mind you, you should see the ones I’m not telling you about and that I never will. One had just had the words “Staggeringly shite” next to it, and that was on a pilot script for a show that then ran for years.

Clearly, I know my stuff.

 

Press Gang

Quote me no quotes

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One of the more irritating things about me –– I keep a list, it’s available on application –– is that I quote incessantly. It’s not as if I’m ever quoting something you’d know, either. That could even be good.

It’s also not as if I always realise it’s a quote. The line will have become part of me, part of my idiolect, but I didn’t think it up, not so much. Now I say that bit aloud, I realise I could’ve got away with just quoting. If you don’t know it’s a quote, you might get irritated by its repetition over the years, but you couldn’t know I stole the line. I would have got away with it, but for you pesky kid.

I wish you’d been pesky another week. Because the line I have been forcibly reminded is a quote, the line that made me want to confess my sins to you today, is really tough to set up clearly. Nonetheless, you’re here, I’m here, we’ve got my quote, let’s play our game.

Please imagine you and I have got to a party or somewhere and we are waiting to be let in. It has been known that when the door opens, I may gesture to you and tell the host that “I caught this one trying to escape.” That’s it. You may well struggle to imagine that it gets a laugh, but over the years, its hit rate is pretty good. It’s not as if I do it every day, that’s not what I’m saying, but it comes up and then it tends to come out of me practically involuntarily.

Okay.

I read a script every day, I suppose because I’m scriptwriter and I want to get better at it, but chiefly because I enjoy it and I see no reason to stop. Since I also appear to need to count things, I can tell you that last Tuesday’s script was the 491st I’ve read this year. Please take a look at page 37, scene 634 from that script:

EXT. CAMPBELL’S DRIVEWAY. EVENING.

…The Butler answers the door. Spike immediately drags Lynda through.

SPIKE: (To Butler) I caught this one trying to escape – dug a tunnel with a cocktail stick.

It’s Press Gang. Series 2, episode 6, “At Last a Dragon” by Steven Moffat. The script is dated March 1, 1989 – you can read it all right here – and I probably saw the episode around the time it aired, February 22, 1990. That’s 31 years, 9 months and 18 days ago. It’s 11,614 days back and I am still quoting what turns out to be half a line from what we’d now call a Young Adult series.

Give me some credit, it’s the better half of the line. But if you’re still imagining us standing at a door, please look at my face as I reach that line in the script and realise all of this.

I was a bit startled. It did also flash me back to interviewing Moffat on the Press Gang newsroom set. It flashed me back further to when I used to work in a large company and we had Christmas parties. I see myself and I don’t know, perhaps 20 other people, in the St John Swallow Hotel in Solihull, where I am the only person at the bar who is more interested in what’s on the TV set than in the bottles.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem it now, but back in the late 1980s, Press Gang simply looked better than anything else. Certainly better than anything else airing around that late afternoon children’s/teen slot. I’m at the bar, the TV is on, the sound is off, and I’m wondering what this movie is I’m watching.

I can’t pin down the date I was at that bar, I can’t guess what Press Gang episode was being shown then. But I can pin down that it was 1,659 weeks and 1 day since I saw “At Last a Dragon”.

And I can tell you that the script still stands up. I’m not overkeen on the cocktail stick line, that’s not going to take a place in my idiolect, but I could do with being able to write that well. Makes you wonder whether Steven Moffat went on to write anything else.

Pronouncing sentence

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I’m hoping it’s the way you tell ’em, but I suspect it’s the way you read it. Please take a look at the following sentence, which is the sole thing I remember from an entire night of nightmares.

“I’m tired of boring people.”

Now, maybe it also depends how nice you are. I would like to think that you read that as meaning I, me, this fella right here in front of you, is weary of some other people who have in some way been continuously boring.

Except I read it as I, me, this guy, is weary of how much he bores everyone.

I did tell you it was a nightmare. I didn’t tell you it was five nights ago and I won’t tell you that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time since thinking about it. But you can possibly guess.

As a result of spending a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it, though, I can definitively say that I’ve now thought back through everybody I’ve ever met. And there was only one man, a councillor I interviewed in Redditch, who was boring. Give him credit, he was clearly practicing to become boring professionally and I am certain he will have made it to the top.

Everybody is interesting. Everything is interesting, absolutely everything.

(Except football.)

But everything else, absolutely everything else is so interesting that I can’t get enough of it.

Apparently I also can’t shut up about it either. For it turns out that this is the 702nd Self Distract I’ve written to you.

I’m not sure how I missed that I’d got to 700, but then I’m equally unsure how in the world I got to 700. I will say, mind, that for the first while, Self Distract was less a letter to you and more some plugging of whatever work I’d just done on Radio Times or BBC Ceefax or BBC News Online or UK DVD Review.

Let’s rule out those few dull ones, then, and call this the 3rd Self Distract.

Or perhaps you and I can think of it as the first since BBC Radio 4 commissioned a play of mine. It’s less a play, more a sacred trust, and I’ve only wanted it for so many years that if they found out, they’d conclude I was a rubbish scriptwriter and take it back.

But while I can’t yet tell you, not even you, what the play is truly about, I can say that it’s based on an archive of letters. Even more letters than there have been Self Distracts, which appears to be saying something.

I think that’s interesting.

Write what you – no.

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This is doing the rounds again and maybe I’m not helping by grumbling about it. But this week I’ve been overhearing the phrase that writers should write what they know and I would like to offer that I know something about this.

I know it’s bollocks.

“Write what you know” is usually either said by people who aren’t writers, or by writers who are talking to people who aren’t and who they just want to get rid of. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, but I do know people who will ask what my current project is and then interrupt part way through the second syllable of the answer. I do tend to then wrap it up with “and, you know” while they say something about how I never tell them what I’m doing.

That’s just irritating me, that doesn’t matter. This “write what you know” idea does matter because it is damaging. There are writers who will believe it and you and I can only hope they recover.

I sound harsh, but then I intend to. If you know a time when you’ve heard it said with the best of intentions, I think it’s like it was interrupted part way through the second syllable. There is a crucial, crucial part that follows and which I’m going to have to make up since it’s never actually been said in the history of writing.

It should go thisaway:

“Write what you know, not as in writing about how it was raining when you put the bins out this morning, but rather how old that made you feel, how the knowledge that you’ve put them out a thousand times and if you’re lucky may get to do it a thousand times more, about how the repetition of a simple chore seems to you to be a metaphor for the pointlessness of life itself, for your failure to achieve anything, and how it feels like a klaxon or a Cloister Bell sounding out how little time you’ve got left before you die.”

Granted, that’s a bit specific.

It also told you more about me than I wanted to –– and that is the point of writing. Diving deeper, revealing more, reaching out. Connecting. Not describing how I forgot the council isn’t collecting garden waste this week and had to go out in the rain again to drag that bin back.

I’ve been working on a play that’s about two friends of mine. Clearly, then, I know them, I am writing what I know. Except I’m not, I’m not at all because in writing it I have learned more about them both and I’ve churned over what I thought I knew, what I’ve discovered, what I feel about them. If they were still alive, I would’ve been round their house a hundred times asking questions.

Then just technically, it’s a difficult play to write and it mustn’t ever seem like it is to the audience. When I started it, I did not know whether I was actually capable of writing what I needed, both because of these startlingly difficult technical issues, and because it’s about friends. Three or four times, I woke up in the morning not only thinking about it, but shaking. Sweating.

You don’t need to know that, the audience for the play mustn’t ever know it, but it is the best thing I’ve ever written and that is specifically because it stretched me far, far and three times far away from anything I knew how to do. Seriously, the very structure of this thing is alien to how I would say I tend to write, but it’s the correct way to tell this story. I now know that it’s the only way to tell it, too.

Sorry I can’t tell you what it is yet. You will be the first.

But for now, I have to write what you don’t know.

Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice

Silent right

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Straight to it: the moment of silence during last week’s Strictly Come Dancing was profoundly moving. It came in the same weekend as Remembrance Day and the one-minute silence there, but maybe silence is stronger for being a surprise.

Well, I say a surprise. The Strictly show did go to some lengths to belabour how the dance by Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice would include something for the deaf community. They did it enough that I thought about how odd it was that they were electing to spoil some moment.

But then little is done without a reason.

Ayling-Ellis and Pernice dance and it is remarkable, it’s peculiar how one pair moving to music works and another doesn’t, but this is a particularly strong performance –– and then that dance continued even as the music stopped for a time. Dances on this show are only 90 seconds long so I don’t really have the faintest idea how short this gap was, but it was a strong gap and I actually gasped.

Strictly is a shiny-floor show, and I am as unlikely to be moved by an air-once celebrity programme as I am a football match. So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise and when it’s in a surprising place.

The reason for spoiling how there would be some moment for the deaf community, though, was for the community of people whose first thought is to complain. Like the audiences for Contact who left their cinema seats to go ask the projectionist what the hell they thought they were doing, losing the sound half a minute into the movie.

So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise that you’ve been warned about. No, sod that. Those Contact audience people were just thick and there are always going to be thick people. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether I’m one of them.

Strictly’s silence made me gasp. Contact’s opening sequence made me hold my breath. Both completely unconsciously.

Mind you, I think I may have held my breath a little during the first Mission: Impossible film when your man is hanging from a rope in that noise-detecting room thing.

And actually, now I think of it, it was the few frames of silence at the very start of Trainspotting that grabbed me.

Clearly, I like silence and must use it more in my writing. Starting with

Left wanting

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I’m not sure of the road that I went down to get to what I want to talk to you about today. But I know it began with writer Ken Armstrong and a piece he wrote about writing and not writing. It’s his story and therefore it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s everyone’s, but to disregard everything else he said and just pull out a bit that burrowed into me, there was a bit about fair weather writing.

Rather than writing only when the muse strikes –– if I’ve ever had a muse, he or she has been on strike for a very long time –– or when you fancy it, writers write. I write every day and I suppose that takes effort but it’s as normal and ordinary as breathing or wanting chocolate. I write unthinkingly, which may account for the standard of it.

But I do write and if I really do fail to think about whether it’s an effort or not, I at least recognise enough to know that I should simply nod encouragingly when someone says they’ve always meant to write a book. Mind you, it’s fantastic when they then do write one. Love that, can’t get enough of that.

Only, somehow I went from thinking about all that to thinking about all this. You do rather have to want to write. You’ve met people who talk about being published and earning riches beyond the dreams of JK Rowling, but that also means you’ve probably met people who don’t want to write. If someone wants to skip to the end bit, and a pretty unlikely end bit, they don’t want to write.

Two or maybe three times now, I’ve worked with groups of writers and we either got an opportunity or, much better, we made one. And these writers complained. They’d got what they said they wanted, they just now preferred to complain about some invisible element of it instead of writing.

They wanted to write but they don’t want to write.

I think now that even though a group I’m thinking of from five or six years ago were all writers and actually did all write every day, or near enough, they still somehow retained a portion of this same thing where they were happier sticking around the wanting instead of the doing.

And I also think now that I’m sounding as if I feel superior. I admit in that one group, I was irritated and said if they didn’t want this opportunity they’d been given, I’d take it. Next thing I knew, they’d gone ahead and done it –– without me. Not going to lie, that stung.

Yet if I should’ve waited a bit more with that group and probably said a bit less, I painfully admit that I did feel superior in that first moment. I tend to want to get on with things, many other people don’t, not so much.

Except.

I’m obviously nowhere close to superior anyway, but in particular I think this is a case of disliking in others what you dislike in yourself. I’ve wanted to write television since I saw “Lou Grant” in the 1970s. I can point to this last year or 18 months where my scriptwriting has been getting me TV meetings, I can point to how there’s an extraordinarily important –– to me –– radio play progressing pixel by pixel toward commission.

But it does all feel a bit late and I do feel as if just wanted it for such a long time. I should listen to myself and get on with it.

You know I want to.

Remember, remember, words can punch

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I am occasionally quite critical of my old school and that’s completely unfair. For one thing, it is entirely because of its teaching that I remember, remember the 5th of November and if that is less of a political education than it could have been, sometimes it can be all the politics I can take.

Then, of course, I can count the number of times I’ve needed to know that September hath thirty days. I can count because I presume I lean on this fact at most annually, but I won’t count because then I’d have to think about how many years it’s been since I was a schoolboy.

Apparently someone I was at school with is now in charge of the place. I want to assume he’s made it better, I keep wondering instead if he’s actually always been stuck there in some kind of purgatory.

Anyway. Something that would surprise my teenage self about what became of me is that I once had a request on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. I presume my school taught us some poetry but not well enough to remember and certainly not enough to mean that with a combination of their teaching and whatever writing skill I have, that I can write any poetry at all.

I cannot, cannot write poetry and all of this is partly on my mind because tomorrow I’m running a workshop that is all about it. It occurs to me that you might well think now that I am keeping up the high standards of my school, but I promise you, no. I’ve got a poet helping me in the workshop. I say helping me, I’m going to throw the ball to her and then soak up every syllable she says.

I think a lot about syllables, I think even more about words, and it’s an enjoyable kind of thinking which it rather needs to be since I’ve yet to actually get anywhere with the thoughts. Especially not when the words and the syllables are poetry. I can do it with prose, if you give me some prose I can express why I do or don’t like it, and I can vocalise why I do or don’t like a script.

Not poetry.

I am incapable of assessing a poem, just physically unable to have any kind of coherent opinion. What I can have from poetry, though, is a slap to the face.

Last night I re-read “Sweet Sorrow”, a stage play by Alan Plater. A group of people are having their annual party celebrating the life of poet Philip Larkin when an unexpected guest comes to the door. It’s the late Philip Larkin. And the play reeks of being Alan’s tribute to his friend, but it’s also very simply – in every sense of that phrase – moving.

It features many of Larkin’s poems and you also realise in the last moments that the entire play really comes straight from one of them. Like the script says, I only know the famous one about what your parents do to you, but across two acts, I am shown very many more and shown so well that these could now be favourite poems of mine.

That’s not why I wanted to talk to you about this today.

No, the reason is that the play has a brief nod to another poet, Christina Rossetti. It features a few lines from her “When I am dead, my dearest” and, for me, specifically these:

And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

That’s it. That’s the poem I asked to be read on Poetry Please. I was at the live recording in the Birmingham Literature Festival and practically first met poet Jo Bell there because she was sitting next to me in the audience. I remember she knew to put a sympathetic, empathetic hand on my knee. I want to say she knew to hold my hand. Those two lines make me weep and I was sitting there, shaking.

Last night I was in my office, reading an old stage play by a friend I miss, and those lines are the ones that slap me.

I am actually crying right now, writing them to you.

This is what my school should have taught about poetry. I have a sense that they would’ve said, and surely my teenage self would have thought, that crying over a poem means you’re weak. Now I know that it means the words are strong.

And that’s what I really needed to learn. Not poetic structure, not the fact that Rossetti died 127 years ago, I’ll take all of that and know it’s interesting, but fuck explanations, the point is that words are so strong.