Forty years ago when I was at college — it’s forty years? — I organised a group to go see the then-new “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” at the cinema.

No one came.

Now, look, all this time on, I’m obviously over it. I mean, today I couldn’t even tell you how many of the bastards were supposed to join me. Though I do wonder if this is why I so rarely throw parties and even yesterday was over-concerned about an event I’m producing.

But anyway. Since it is forty years, the film was briefly re-released in cinemas and I didn’t turn up. Mostly because I forgot to book, I forgot the whole thing, but possibly on some kind of principle. I don’t know.

I do know that I went in to see the film that day in 1984 and from curiosity and nostalgia, the other day I watched the movie on TV. Or tried to. I’m not knocking the film, but it just wasn’t holding me, and so instead I switched on the audio commentary by actor/director Leonard Nimoy.

And got so annoyed.

“You know, it’s science fiction,” says Nimoy in the commentary track. “There’s always possibilities. So you go to the extreme, you do the thing that everybody is scared to do, creates drama, and then you find a way to rebuild out of it.”

Bollocks.

In this case, he was specifically talking about how the USS Enterprise is destroyed in this film, but it’s okay because a duplicate is ready in the next movie. Generally speaking, he could also have been talking about his own character, Spock, who died in the previous film but was of course recalled to life in this one.

At the time, the destruction of the Enterprise genuinely was a big moment. And the death of Spock was actually moving. Both were also surprising: these were key, tentpole parts of a story and they were gone.

So well done, Nimoy and writer Harve Bennett, this was Star Trek being actually fresh and maybe even brave. Except it wasn’t brave at all, both ship and Spock were back soon, and if nothing can take away from it seeming fresh at the time, it is stale now and the stench persists through every subsequent film that tries the same bullshit.

All these years on, the same total bollocks is somehow believed by film and TV makers. They are correct that killing a character or altering something fundamental to a story is extreme, is “the thing that everybody is scared to do,” and that it “creates drama”.

But you cannot then undo it.

Undo it and the drama is destroyed, the extreme becomes the mundane. Actually, more than that, the extreme becomes the cheat.

I’m not saying that killing of a character or doing anything else extreme is automatically dramatic and successfully so. Captain Kirk’s son is killed in that Star Trek movie, for instance, and he doesn’t come back to life. Yet his death gets a few frames of reaction and then he’s rather forgotten.

But specifically in science fiction, and almost solely in science fiction, there is this. If any major character is killed off in any science fiction tale, you can’t even pay me to give a toss.

Maybe the friends who let me down that day were just ahead of the game.

This is a hard one. But it starts with something simple: I’ve only now caught up with the Doctor Who episode “Dot and Bubble” by Russell T Davies and I want to talk to you about some self-realisation it gave me that might be bad, might possibly be passable — no, it’s bad. And it is definitely uncomfortable for me.

Equally, though, I don’t want to spoil an episode. I never want to spoil anything, but I did especially enjoy this one, so the guilt over risking any spoilers is high. Plus if you don’t read on because you haven’t seen the show, then you don’t get to see a reason to think less of me. Everybody wins, or at least I don’t lose.

But since you’re still reading, this is what you need to know about the episode in order to be disappointed in me. “Dot and Bubble” is set in a totally white world, every character is white except for the Doctor, and just about every trace of diversity is intentionally non-existent. It’s marvellous: the final scenes when this is all in high and prickly relief, it’s a real moment in drama.

Davies said on Doctor Who Unleashed that he and the team didn’t know whether it would take ten minutes, or twenty minutes, for viewers to realise how anti-diverse the episode is. And he also explicitly said that if you didn’t notice at all, why didn’t you?

I didn’t notice.

Let me defend myself for a second, and point out that I am conscious that I am alert to the point of switching off when drama has women sidelined. Then last year, someone asked me what I thought of Britain having its first Indian prime minister and I was surprised by the question. Let alone not caring, it had never even crossed my cortex that Rishi Sunak is or isn’t Indian. I was going to say that if you asked me to list facts about Sunak, that his being Indian would come a long way down the roll call, but that isn’t true: it wouldn’t be on there at all.

I just had to look up Rishi Sunak to check I was getting this right.

Forced to examine this — and as uncomfortable as I am, I like that I am being forced to examine this — I want to say that I’m obviously blind to race. That’s great of me, clearly.

And it’s bollocks.

The truth has to be that I did not notice what “Dot and Bubble” was doing because I’ve never had to think about it. Intellectually I believe that I recognise racism and sexism, but I’ve never actually been on the receiving end, I’ve never had to feel it.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was so lost in thought that someone made me jump. The thing is, I can be lost in thought. I don’t have to never be lost in it. If I were a woman, for instance, there’s substantially less chance that I could allow myself to be so distracted that I am startled by a man coming up to me.

We all have to be aware of our surroundings or we could get mugged, but I can be lost in thought and I can believe myself to be blind to race or gender, because I am exceptionally privileged.

I am a white, middle-aged, boring man. If I were wealthy, I’d practically be in government.

I don’t know what to do and that’s a little scary. But I like that I’m scared. I should be. I need to be. Because otherwise nothing changes and I don’t know the point of life or of writing if we aren’t changed by it all.

There’s an unanswered debate in television news to do with just how long you keep captioning something as being Breaking News. I think the best approximate answer is that you do it until you can reasonably expect most of your audience to know whatever it is — but I also think that in practice, it’s usually left too long and often only ended because something else has happened which takes over the Breaking News label.

But now I’m wondering if the same thing is true in drama. Follow, using Torchwood as an example. I want to say first that I think Torchwood is quite deeply underrated and also that the writer of the episode I’ve just read the script is JC Wilsher, who I quite deeply admire. Nonetheless, the teaser to his episode “Reset” concludes with this:

This as the big door rolls open to reveal:

JACK: Miss Martha Jones!

Push in on Martha, standing, framed by the door, grinning.

You can read the script here. There’s no way to not realise that she’s important. But there is something in the writing and in the episode that leaves me thinking it is presumed you know who she is. To be clear, Martha Jones was in Doctor Who until June 30, 2007, and Torchwood: Reset aired February 13, 2008. Maybe I’m being unreasonable here since 2007 is now an impossible 17 years ago, but even on first airing, Martha had left our screens months before. About seven and a half months, to be exact.

So there’s just something wrong here, for me. Something wrong about the tone. There’s something off about the presumption of what the audience already knows. I think about this a lot: no show goes on the air without a lot of publicity so generally speaking an audience is at least very likely to know the premise, so there’s a question over whether the show should get on with things faster.

Alan Plater did a lovely thing with exactly this and the drama Belonging, based on the novel The Web of Belonging by Stevie Davies. Since the entire thing was about someone going missing, and that was entirely how it was publicised, Alan had this person missing right at the start — for just a moment. He played with our expectations and if he was having a little laugh at us, either we were in on the laugh or if we didn’t already know the premise, the gag still worked without spoiling anything. That’s a remarkably deft bit of writing, and I’m sure it came from this meta business of the story and what the audience is supposed to know.

If you look up this season of Torchwood – it was the second one – you find that the general consensus is that it was better than the first. I’m not sure. I like the show very much and there are superb episodes in that second season, but there’s also very often a tone I don’t think is right. Too often the characters will make little quips — not in Reset, just generally — and I say too often, what I mean is more than never. Every time there’s a smart aside, I’m out of Torchwood and into bad 1970s US police shows with perfect human beings saying what no one ever says and having squarer jaws than is feasible.

I’m also somehow excluded when it should feel inclusive. Typically the quip will be to do with how the main character, Captain Jack Harkness, literally cannot die, or it’s about his polyamorous nature, both of which are things that the audience does know, does get to know about. So these characters making these comments, they’re saying what we know, therefore it should feel as if we are in on the quip, we get it.

Instead, somehow, it’s excluding. It feels smug. Instead of my being in the story, I feel as if I’m watching a story. There’s a later episode, I won’t name it, where I had the oddest feeling throughout that the characters were saying what they were saying solely because that was what was written down in the script. It didn’t feel like characters talking. I don’t understand this because reading the script it seemed okay, it was only then watching the finished show that it felt wrong. And Torchwood had excellent actors, yet still lines and quips didn’t land.

I’m talking about this now because I’m reading the scripts but with this unnamed other episode, watching it now I remember so clearly being really irritated in  2008 by the production. One character has grabbed a certain thing and is now running to get to somewhere, and as a viewer I have not one thing clue why they particularly want to get to this place. Why they want to get away, fine, got that, but why this location other than it’s an excellent filming location, that’s beyond me.

Then there is a moment when the thing he grabbed has to be thrown to someone and that was an oh-for-god’s-sake (OFGS) instant. The thing is shown going through the air in slow motion and over it we have felt like — and I’ve read the script now, I know it’s true — a last-minute addition. It was a last minute addition that has a character explaining why this thrown thing is important.

It’s an extra line but one of those that you can smell the BBC meetings that went on about it. Viewers won’t understand, goes the logic, so we have to tell them.

Yeah, no, if the audience does not understand something in minute 40 of a 45-minute story, it’s the preceding minutes that need to be fixed, not the 40th by itself. Over and over, in so many films and TV shows you see exactly this worry, but even when it’s right, even when it’s true that the audience will not understand, let them not understand. They’ve stuck with you for 40 minutes, they’re in the story, don’t throw them out because you think you need an OFGS explanation.

I started there being specific about Torchwood and then I got a bit more general. I’d like to go back to Torchwood to tell you a nicer story about it.

I can’t remember the date now, but it would have been sometime after July 2009 when Torchwood: Children of Earth ran as a five-night special. I was in Cardiff at Upper Boat, what was then the Doctor Who studios, for a Radio Times Torchwood photoshoot. Actors Eve Myles and John Barrowman were there in costume, there was an armorer who showed me the shockingly heavy guns the characters were to be filmed at and I wish to god I could remember why we were all doing it.

But at the end, walking out with Eve Myles, I told her about my watching Children of Earth. The episodes ran right before the nightly news on BBC1 and I told her that on the first evening, watching the news, I couldn’t comprehend why what was happening to the children wasn’t being mentioned. I had got so into the story that I genuinely couldn’t grasp why what was happening to them wasn’t breaking news.

Seriously.

And get this: all these years later, I read the five scripts to Torchwood: Children of Earth and felt exactly as overwhelmingly caught up in it. Right there on the page, agog without any actors, any production, just the text, and over something I’d already seen. It was a marvellous, marvellous read.

I want to say that I love this, I love that a drama can so envelop your mind, but actually I don’t think the word love is remotely close enough. I lust after drama that does this to you, even for a moment. And while I trundle along thinking I want to write drama like that, I also think that it’s something Torchwood was able to do far more often than it is given credit for.

I had this reputation at school for being good with computers. It’s possible I had other reputations, I don’t think I was especially noticed for anything, but I had this computer thing and I was fully immersed in the lie. Back then, I was the drama nut I still am, but I’d been laughed at by my careers teacher for wanting to write, so I briefly dove into this computing thing I was seemingly good at.

Honestly, you’d be as shocked as I was to learn that how crap at this I was. Even Systems Analysis, which sounded to me like detective work, seemed to be so far beyond me that I could not see it was beyond me.

But anyway, there was briefly coursework before my school — not what you’d call in a class of its own — decided to abandon its O-Level computing because it didn’t have staff. I remember so visually the moment that the teacher came in and decided to tell us by starting with a question. Who wants to do O-Level computing? he asked. Maybe because of the aforementioned lack of a decent teacher, quite a few people put their hand up. You’re in luck, then, he said, because we’re cancelling it.

I remember even more red-faced angrily visually the face of a woman in the row ahead of me when I objected. “We voted!” she said. “Bullshit,” I wish I’d said.

Whatever I did say, I would not allow the school to kill off the one exam I had a chance of passing, so the fight began. And actually it ended quite soon after when it was arranged that I’d sit the exam at some other school. I want to say night school. Can’t remember.

But the reason this is on my mind now is because of the coursework. I wrote a noughts-and-crosses game on an RML 380Z and the thing of it was that it drew the board instantly — in a few minutes. That’s how I pitched it, that I’d got this wretched machine to ta-daa the board instead of making us wait, watching as it drew a lot of white blobs in a row. It was still drawing them, still being as slow, but I found how to make it hide all of that until it was ready, and then ta-daa.

I hope I at least gave my teachers something to look at. A splash screen. Anything. Something. But I expect I didn’t and instead the ta-daa would come after minutes of blank, black screen that showed only the reflection of people edging to get away.

So it was instant, but it took a long time.

And yesterday, I switched to a faster way of producing a podcast and it is definitely faster, it is unquestionably the way I should be doing this particular show, but it took me three hours longer than the old, slow way.

That meant I worked for 16 hours yesterday, and as it happens did so on about four hours interrupted sleep. There was a point when I found out that one version of the podcast had inexplicably gone wrong, every track and everything on every track was randomly out of step. Then there was a point where I did have to bounce it back to Logic Pro because I’d cocked up something else — and first Logic wouldn’t open, then it insisted on looping only the opening eight seconds of that audio.

I tell you, I came close to crying with tiredness.

But that show is about an hour and forty minutes long, and by tomorrow it will have been released and then listened to by thousands of people. Hang on, if only one thousand listen, that’s 1,667 hours of listening to what took me 90 minutes to record, then an admittedly ridiculous five hours to edit. If I hadn’t been so tired as to be barely functioning, it would’ve been so much faster but still, a few hours for me becoming at least hundreds of hours for other people. I like it.

None of them will know, nor should they ever even have a stabbing guess in the dark, that the show took me as long as it did. It’s there for them instantly, it just took a lot of minutes to be instant.

Time is an illusion, you said it.

A friend was telling me a story this week, and she was doing it in the way you can when it’s writer to writer: there doesn’t have to be a beginning yet, certainly not an ending, it’s really anything but a story, yet you get what it is going to be. You get why the writer is so sure they’ve got something with punch.

I obviously can’t tell you the story because it’s hers, not mine, but the key part was a spooky idea and I was appropriately spooked — but then I thought I had a failure of imagination. Where she was happy to have created that moment and to just see where it could take her characters, my head was treating it like reality, my head was coming up with questions. I was coming up with quite smart ways of explaining away the idea.

Fortunately, I didn’t tell her those, I just skipped to the next part and confessed to a failure of imagination. I think I convinced her that I got the idea and that I understood why she was so pleased with it, I think I convinced her that I was as spooked as I really was. But I’m not sure.

I was automatically using same parts of my head that listen to an interviewee and even as I’m nodding away, even as I’m saying yes, yes, I see, those parts of me are thinking right, why’s he lying and what’s he lying about and how can I prove it?

A failure of imagination and a cynic.

Only, she wasn’t the only one of us with a story where there is a spooky moment. In my case, I know, I can feel, I can taste that it will make you shiver if I can just position it at precisely the right spot in the story.

I told her this and she nodded politely and tried to convince me she was appropriately spooked.

Maybe I’m wrong about my failure of imagination. Or I’m wrong about writers being able to tell other writers this kind of unfinished, gauzy thread of an idea.

Either way, there are now two stories with shivery bits in and they won’t write themselves, so.

There’s a very simple, apparently inconsequential scene in Jack Rosenthal’s “Ready When You Are, Mr McGill” that runs, in total, like this:

EXT. STREET: WALL OF A HOUSE. MORNING

A DECORATOR, carrying ladders, paint, brushes, snap-tin and morning paper wanders past the unit, watching their preparations with blank-faced fascination. He starts to organise himself, preparing for his own day’s work – painting the entire wall of the house.

The unit mentioned there is a film crew: this one-off TV play is about the making of a film — well, no, that’s so wrong as to be embarrassing. It’s about the people, but what they’re doing is making a film.

What they’re doing is excruciating and feels so real that you can believe Rosenthal’s claims that it got confusing when the director called cut but there’d be a beat while people worked out if it were the real director or the character, and whether they should cut or not.

To this day I have been known to quote lines from this play, I adore it.

But just about the one character who is not involved in the film is this decorator. It’s not a long play — there was a 2003 remake that made it feature-length and it wasn’t as good — so in about 52 minutes, the decorator appears at 9 minutes or so.

And then while we see him and his progress from time to time, it’s about 48 minutes in when we get this:

EXT. STREET: WALL. EARLY EVENING

The DECORATOR stands back to appreciate his day’s work. The entire wall is now painted. Satisfied, he collects his snap-tin, paint, brushes, ladder, etc., lights a cigarette stub and walks off.

While he’s been achieving that painted wall, the film crew cast have failed to do anything at all. So much effort, so much energy, so much time, and nothing achieved whatsoever.

Completely unrelated, I’ve been sitting and typing in this chair for the past few days while four men put up a shed in our garden.

I get confused about chapter books, I think it’s meant to be just another term for a book that’s too short. But in 2003, Paul Auster wrote a full-length novel called Oracle Night, and it is one chapter long. The paperback edition is 256 pages long, but it is a single chapter.

And I cannot comprehend how I am sure that is part of what makes the novel so — I want to say compelling, but that’s not a strong enough word. Gripping doesn’t cut it either. Grasping, maybe. It grasps you, shakes you about a bit, then chucks you aside at the end.

Maybe it’s just because I’m so used to thinking that I’ll read to the end of this chapter before I go to sleep, and then found there wasn’t a next chapter coming up in a few pages.

Last month saw the end of a chapter in another sense, as Auster died, aged 77. There won’t be any more grasping novels.

Except there will for me. Because I was agog over Paul Auster’s writing right up through 1992 and the tremendous Leviathan. The book before that, The Music of Chance, initially bored me but then I was on a train, I had nothing else to read, and the next thing I know I’m about to miss my stop because it shifts from boring to grasping. So there was that, then after it Leviathan, and before it both Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. All favourites.

But in 1994 there was Mr Vertigo and in 1999 there was Timbuktu. It seemed to me at the time that he’d fallen off a bit, so I fell off too. I said Oracle Night was in 2003 but I don’t think that’s when I read it. I don’t think I read his 2002 novel The Book of Illusions on publication either, but I’ve read it since. I’ve read it several times since. Auster was back, I thought, and so I eventually carried on buying the novels.

Yet for some reason, I didn’t read them. So right now on my shelves I have six of his novels and I just learned that I’d missed the latest one — the last one — that came out in 2023.

There’s a decent chance, then, that I have seven superb novels to read even though the writer is gone. I have no expectations of being remembered when I’ve left a room, let alone died, but the fact that a writer’s work can continue after them is a pleasure. The writing becomes separated from the writer.

Although maybe writer and writing are always separated in at least some way. Because many years ago now, I was at UCLA doing research for a book project and it turned out that I had arrived the morning after Paul Auster had given a talk there. I told the staff how sorry I was to miss him, but I can see both of them now, gently shaking their heads and saying no.

They had both found him to be an arse.

Maybe he was, maybe it was them, maybe I’m remembering this wrong after god knows how many years it is. But you can think of other examples where this kind of thing was true, or is true. I cherish the fact that Alan Plater once described a novel of mine as being worthy of Patricia Highsmith, for instance, even after I then looked her up and learned about her politics.

I cherish the fact that Kate Bush said recently that no, she wasn’t a Tory, she’d been misquoted. And there’s that Wagner fella, let’s not forget him. Or at least, let’s forget him and remember only his music.

I’ve met writers I admire who turn out to be superb human beings. But I’ve been trying to be a superb human being all my life. Maybe for the sake of my writing, I should become an arse.

You may feel I’m already well on the way, but I’m considering putting some effort into it now.