“Passata non grata” has nothing to do with what I want to talk to you about today, it’s just that a minute ago I was taking our bins and I dropped an empty passata di pomodoro box on the floor. Except this stuff is like toothpaste, it’s never actually empty unless you need it.

I did also want to bury my topic a few lines down so that it wouldn’t appear in the preview if you or anyone should ever happen to Google it. This isn’t some paranoid thing, it’s certainly not important, and really I suppose it’s on a par with how I’ll be quite happy if an abrupt subject confuses the hell out of AI summarisers.

Here’s the thing, though let me work backwards a bit. I read a headline that was of course clickbait, but that particular flavour where the point is to disagree with everyone else as vehemently as you can. Loud is the watchword. Memorable would be good, but clicking on it is essential.

I’ve actually forgotten the headline. But it was something to the effect that the film Project Hail Mary needed 39% fewer laughs to be good. I remember the figure. And I remember that it was followed by a standfirst paragraph that included how the writer was perplexed by the film.

So. Here’s a writer saying they didn’t understand something, but they know exactly — to the precise percentage — how it should be fixed.

I’ve often written critical reviews where I’ve attempted to vocalise what I thought hadn’t worked, but I’ve never written it about something I felt perplexed by. And actually, I believe I’ve always written it fully aware — and saying so — that my opinion after two hours of watching a film is a pimple next to the years that hundreds of people spent working on it.

Maybe this writer did the same, and maybe the 39% was itself a gag because there’s some maths in the film. I don’t know. Because I stopped reading. There I was, clicking into it, so I was caught, and here I am talking about it, so I’m engaged with it as people who make things solely for money would say.

Talking to you, I think I should have read on and that by criticising its criticism without having done so, is wrong. I think that’s right, that I’m wrong. And yet, bollocks to it. I’ve long ago learned not to read any article where the headline is a question — the reason why has even got a name, it’s Betteridge’s Law — and I’m learning not to read headlines that shriek only that they will say anything to get you to click.

There is that other type, the one that is about a film or a book or a TV show that is in some way astounding, but the article will not name it for the first seven paragraphs. I presume that’s to get you to scroll past the first two ads, but if the title isn’t in the headline and it isn’t in the standfirst paragraph, fuck ’em.

Project Hail Mary, incidentally, was guaranteed critical coverage because as I imagine you’ve seen, so much else of the coverage is praising. My sole hesitation about contributing to that praise is that I think you can definitely build something up too much.

But I adored Andy Weir’s novel, I am ecstatic that every single piece of coverage — that I’ve finished reading or watching, anyway — has singled out his writing. Some even praise the screenwriter, so I’m thinking this is a parallel universe but one that I like.

Let me try this, though. In case you haven’t seen the film or read the book, just know that there is a character called Rocky. The other night I saw a clip from the premiere of the film where Rocky was being interviewed and I was shocked at how just hearing his admittedly distinctive voice had me right back in the movie.

You know I liked the film, I knew I liked it, but I didn’t appreciate quite how much I did until I heard that voice again.

I had my first ever piano lesson this week. And since then I have spent the entire time trying to think of how to use this as a clever metaphor for something. Maybe for trying to expand when the world is pressing us inwards, maybe. I can see that one.

But then there’s also this. My piano teacher — it is very strange saying that to you, er, especially as at time of writing I haven’t heard whether she’s agreed to take me on following that trial lesson — where was I? Thanks. My piano teacher lives ludicrously close to me and while I’ve never been down her road before, I have driven by it and parallel to it perhaps a good hundred thousand times or more.

On Tuesday night, I parked on a spot I knew from these drives and walked on up toward hers. It was very cold, she lived much further up the road than my map was trying to tell me, and for a night that was supposed to be about music, it was shockingly quiet. At one high spot on this road, I stood for a moment looking back from this strange perspective out across roads and houses and shops that I know fantastically well — from other angles.

It was like seeing all of them for the first time. The difference in perspective was two metres, maybe three at a push. Every single thing I could see was already known to me. But now every single thing was fresh and new too.

I did stay staring for too long and then had to rush to get to the lesson. And there of course there was another perspective shift as there is a decent chance I’ve spent a million hours at keyboards in my writing life, but here was a totally new one.

No metaphors, just a better world for looking around and doing something new.

I worked in a school yesterday as a visiting author. I do this a few times a year and it is of course an utter privilege to be asked. But this one was unusual.

Instead of meeting writers from half a dozen schools, I was working only with pupils from one. Instead of a whole day with the same group, I had three separate sessions, and instead of a primary school, it was a secondary one. Plus the three sessions had to be like a greatest hits of the kinds of workshops I’ve done before. One was to be about scriptwriting, one about journalism, and then the last one, that was the most unusual.

While it’s easily ten years since I’ve done this one, I was booked for that last session expressly to do a workshop about writing a Doctor Who play in an hour.

But of the twenty pupils, one knew the show well, one didn’t like it, and the rest had not one thin clue what this was about. One of them thought it was to do with Doctor Doolittle.

Now, okay, scratch that idea, do something else, and we ended up spending 90 minutes writing an absurd play about either killer clowns or killer cows, depending on your preference. The Doctor wasn’t even in it.

It went well and I like when I have to change things, but the fact that Doctor Who is totally absent from this audience mostly shocked me. I can’t say it totally did because I had a concern going in, even if I didn’t know why. But still, here is this massive show, this beacon of British television, here is this series that at its best I think is unequalled, and they didn’t know it.

You’re thinking that’s because school-age pupils don’t watch television any more, and you’re right of course, but there were quoting films like Ratatouille.

Doctor Who has run for sixty-odd years yet it can be as if it never existed.

I think everything we do is fleeting, which is not a reason to give up on it all, but sometimes the sheer scope of what fleets away gives me pause.

I’m sure you can’t be interested in how I have a dispute with Deliveroo, but I think there’s actually a writing aspect to this.

Follow. All that’s happened is that Deliveroo failed to, well, deliver back in January. After plenty of promises of responses within 48 hours, here we are six or seven weeks later with the firm still refusing to refund our money. It’s a legal requirement that they refund us: the company is already in breach of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and this is another example of that.

Okay, so naturally I’m not going to let it go. But if Deliveroo’s PR team has any kind of decent web crawler and picks this up, let me look them straight in the eye. Alongside the fact that what you’re doing is illegal, Deliveroo, the total guarantee that I will never drop this is also down to how you wrote some of your responses. Many times now, you’ve ended the refusal to return our money with variations on the line “We hope we can look forward to your custom again in future.”

I feel this is unlikely. But you will certainly be speaking to me, again, and quite soon, quite often. Until you refund our money.

Are they gone?

Good, let’s back to you and me here. Because I’ve got to tell you this. At one point, presumably stuck for something new to say, they also claimed to have escalated my whole £16.53 case to their global team. They wanted us to know they had taken this very seriously, that it had all been fed back to their teams, and while they regrettably cannot return the money that belongs to us, that they would use this to improve their service going forward.

I know you’re thinking that they should improve their service going backwards a few weeks, but it suddenly sounds to me like they’re going to spend my money on a pizza for the team.

Hope they don’t use Deliveroo.

Something I’ve realised that I’m good at — I think, anyway — is getting characters’ voices. When I wrote Big Finish Doctor Who stories for instance, the Doctor is always the Doctor, but Peter Davison’s Fifth speaks and acts very differently to Colin Baker’s Sixth. I found it very easy to do the two.

After reading hundreds of Deep Space Nine scripts, I can talk to you like I’m a Klingon. I do not expect this to come up often.

Nor, really, is any of it useful outside of writing. It can actually be embarrassing: in the last year I have picked up and simply cannot shake a verbal tic from “Astrid: Murder in Paris”. The title character keeps saying “ah” in a tight, truncated way and now, apparently, so do I. She also gesticulates with her fingers and while I’ve always been a gesticulator, I’ve seen me doing it too. Mind you, it also exercises fingers that have just spent 12 hours typing, so maybe that one is okay.

But I can’t get ex-Prince Andrew. I also can’t hold in my head his new name, so ex-P will have to do and I will revise this if he ever becomes Prisoner 4642 at his brother’s pleasure. Yesterday when he was arrested was easily the first time I’ve ever followed any royal news other than his interview with Emily Maitlis back in 2019. Michael Sheen got him in “A Very Royal Scandal” by Jeremy Brock from the book by Maitlis, and so did Rufus Sewell in “Scoop” by Peter Moffat from the book by Sam McAlister, both in 2024.

It’s not that I want to be able to talk like ex-P and no one, including me, wants to do an impression. Yet how someone speaks says a lot about how they think. And I’d like to understand how ex-P thinks, I’d like to think about what it was like for him being arrested and held all day yesterday.

Unless your characters are all really yourself — you can argue that Aaron Sorkin’s are and he seems to have done okay — then you need to be able to write ones who see the world in a different way. You have to be able to write ones you don’t like. And if they’re not to be straw men or women, you have to inhabit that mindset, you have to at least briefly, or possibly hopefully briefly, believe that these characters are right. Because they believe they are.

I don’t get the impression that ex-P is big on introspection but he will unquestionably believe he is in the right. I want to know how it feels to be arrested and held when you are certain you’re right. I want to know if there comes a point when you crack and start thinking maybe you were wrong. I want to know what that moment feels like.

And with this guy, I can’t think myself into his position. It is a failing in me as a writer, I realise.

But then even as I’ve been saying this to you and my mind has been so into the dramatic responsibility to write characters, I am of course also acutely aware that I’m talking absolute shite altogether. Here I am, thinking about dialogue, thinking about ex-P, and therefore not thinking of the victims.

That appalls me because it means I’m like so many other people. So much attention on ex-P, on Mandelson, on Epstein. So little thought for the women. Actually, so little thought that Department of Justice is only concentrating on protecting the rich men involved, or at least protecting one of them.

I can’t get ex-P. But apparently in this focusing away from the women involved, I can too easily get the same mindset as every other man.

I need tea.

ER is now on Netflix in the UK and like anyone else, I ran first to watch season 5, episode 1, “Day for Knight” by Lydia Woodward.

The thing is, until I saw that smash to titles and heard that theme there on episode 92 of the show, I had forgotten that ER is absurdly linked to my own career. Not that Woodward or any other writer on the series would know this, but I do, except that I’d forgotten.

There’s a decent argument that I owe my work on Radio Times to ER. Or at least to my work on the Radio Times website. Because either at the application stage or possibly during the interview, I was required to critique any other online TV guide and it was so easy. For, as I pointed out to Radio Times, Sky’s website let you search for shows but, for some unfathomable reason, at the time required you to type in at least three letters. I said this was a problem, since Sky’s most popular and so presumably most searched-for series then was ER.

I got the job.

But as is the way of what any chronology would call messy, if it could be bothered to call it anything, this was happening when I was also pursuing work at BBC Ceefax. I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying just typing “BBC Ceefax” and “Radio Times” like this. Well, I can, but you’d be bored at my gushing. Instead, let me just say “anyway” and get on to “Day for Knight”.

Anyway.

I’m doing all these things I do at RadioTimes.com but at the same time I was writing TV reviews for BBC Ceefax in BBC Television Centre. And I think you see where this is going. Yes, “Day for Knight” was one of the very first reviews I wrote.

Now, I’m minded of how the sports team at BBC Radio WM were very proud of the row of tape reels they had that featured their radio commentary on famous sporting events. I’m afraid I looked at it as a set of recordings of someone watching something. It was like saying something was a show because you had a Gogglebox recording of someone watching it.

In the same way, I see that my having reviewed a show is of course meaningless next to the show itself. The job, as I saw and still see it, is to help people find something good to watch. That’s a reviewer’s sole purpose and their sole reason for getting to do it is that they have seen the show first. Screenings, preview tapes, whatever. They’ve seen it so you can get an idea of whether it might be worth your time.

“Day for Knight” was absolutely worth your time, according to me, but a reason for remembering it so vividly — after forgetting it for decades — is that the received opinion at the time disagreed with me.

Nobody complained that I was wrong, I wasn’t remotely significant enough for anyone to bother or really even notice. But at the time, the overall consensus about the episode was that it was less than the tremendous thing I thought then, and think now, it is.

But that criticism was for a really specific reason that has only become more prevalent in television drama. It was that the vocal fans didn’t like the episode. This is like the way you read online that Star TreK: Enterprise only got good in its later seasons, when the truth is that the only people writing about it are fans and by the end the show had given up trying to appeal to anyone else. It became a show that served its fans and that’s nice for them, I suppose, but to me it meant Enterprise stepped off a cliff.

And if the reason for criticism of “Day for Knight” was only that the ER fans didn’t like it, they didn’t like it for one specific reason. It happens to be the reason I most enjoyed the episode, so of course I remember it. “Day for Knight” is the introduction of Lucy Knight (Kellie Martin) and after 91 episodes, this one is seen from her point of view instead of the regular cast. The regulars are all there, but the episode is from Knight’s perspective and what I adore is that from that view, the regulars don’t look quite as great as usual. It’s fantastic: you’re seeing familiar characters from a different angle and I loved it.

I’d rather love something than hate it, so what I’ve taken from that moment is that your enjoyment of anything includes the baggage you bring to it. Sometimes there’s more baggage on you than there is anything in the show.

And I did not realise until this moment that what I’m actually talking to you about is Bad Bunny and all the bollocks around his half-time Super Bowl show. There isn’t any — not any — criticism of his performance that doesn’t tell you more about the critic than the show. I suppose you can argue that the praise for his show also reveals something of the critic, but that one I’m okay with because they’re celebrating something well done and also they are not talking bullshit.