I’m tempted to start this thought at the end, partly because it fits the topic that’s on my mind, but also because I just generally get irritated by people telling me to begin at the beginning. So let’s do it.

I just re-watched “Marathon Man” and first-time-watched the opening episode to a serial called “Perpetual Grace, Ltd,” by Steven Conrad & Bruce Terris. What matters for what follows is that the show opens with a man being persuaded to con two old people out of their money. We see how he’s talked into it — the old couple stole that money anyway — and we learn how he’s going to work his way into their home to pull off the con.

And then away off we go, into the con, into the story. There’s much more to come, there are many twists, but here’s the thing. The laying out of the con is at the start of the filmed and aired version of the pilot, it is not in the start of the script.

I think it’s rare to prefer the second version of something you like. For instance, The Princess Bride — by William Goldman, who also wrote Marathon Man and I re-read both scripts this week — is a marvel of a novel to me because I read it before seeing the film, and consequently the film is fine. Whereas film-first friends think the movie is a marvel and the book is fine. You can’t help some people.

But what I’m saying is there is maybe I preferred the script just because that’s what I knew first. I hadn’t heard of the show, I came in totally cold, I just read the next script I could find online. And I’ll tell you that it was late at night when I was reading it, I found it all a bit slow but then by perhaps 20 pages in, grief, I was hooked. I was hooked by how well it turned on a moment, how we went from utterly believing the con man’s story to realising something is wrong.

All of that is on the page, is in the script. None of it is in the aired version where, instead, we know it’s a con from the start.

I’m not going to tell you that I’ve been thinking about this for a week, because you’d hear me. But among the many things I keep coming back to is that bit I just said of finding it slow at the start. Maybe there wasn’t enough to keep people watching if it took a considerable time to get to the reveal of the con, or at least to the reveal of a suspicion that there is one. Maybe this story needed to have its core pulled forward, I don’t know.

But then — hopefully not to spoil anything — Marathon Man, the film, also pushed something back, it delayed something, and this time I think both versions work. There’s a character who turns out to be bad. In the script, we learn this very quickly and the tension is over when will the good guy lead figure it out.

In the finished film, the scene revealing this is gone. I think the decision was that there is enough left to make you doubt, but not to be so sure, and therefore the moment when the good guy lead learns it can be bigger. We can feel something more of the betrayal, so it feels like a character moment as much as a spy film plot reversal.

Marathon Man is paced better than Perpetual Grace, Ltd, I think. Later in the Perpetual pilot, someone is killed and we’re supposed to think we know who it is, but it isn’t. On the page, that was a big moment, but on screen, it felt as if we barely registered there’d been a death before we learned the truth of who had died. Plus there is a peculiar thing in the aired pilot where a character’s face is quite elaborately hidden for several minutes, and it’s the reveal that the actor is Ben Kingsley that takes us smashing into the title sequence.

Over and over, I think about that. I think initial shots showing that character only obscured, in shadow, or backlit, do all ultimately give us an idea that he’s stronger than we are otherwise led to believe. But other than that, the punch out into titles seems like it solely works if you know Ben Kingsley.

So maybe this show’s timing just didn’t work all round.

But it’s left me circling the issue. I think the core idea at the heart of this show so far, the business of the con, is extremely well done on the page. I wonder if when it came to later drafts and the aired version, the makers were just so keen on it that they wanted to get to the idea faster. I know that temptation, I know from having a moment or a character that I’m obsessed with and want to get you to meet them as fast as I can. I know, too, that I have a habit of racing on to the next idea and the next.

There’s that thing Douglas Adams said about how to make a great script, you just a single really good idea — followed by a thousand other really good ideas.

I’m too keen on racing ahead and it means that I fail to milk all of the drama out of an idea. I think the Perpetual Grace, Ltd, script may have been slow and so the aired version may have been done this way to fix that.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I also know this. By the end of the script, I wanted to know more. By the end of the aired episode, I’m not so fussed.

So there’s a drama series I enjoyed recently, but when I got to read the script of the first episode, it was profoundly irritating. The only time I’ve had that before was with the script to Jodie Whittaker’s first Doctor Who, and there I’m convinced the problem was that the version available was one edited after broadcast. It was more concerned with timings than text, so sometimes punctuation was a fond childhood memory and lines that worked when spoken by the cast, read instead like puzzles.

In this case, the script to this other recent show was instead an early draft. It had a different title and many of the scenes were different. It’s tempting to say that they were rougher in the script and more polished on screen, because they probably were, but also scripted scenes that weren’t filmed always seem weaker if you saw the show first.

By the way, this isn’t one of those articles where the headline says something dramatic about a show and then makes you wait five paragraphs before naming it. I’m not naming it. As irritating a read as it was, it still got made and therefore is better than I would’ve written it.

But, grief, it was irritating. So irritating that after it, I re-read the pilot script to Poker Face because that’s very good and I wanted something to enjoy, but also because there is one specific thing it does that this other show did. I wanted to see how it was done in Poker Face because I didn’t remember, it was somehow right.

I re-read the sequence. And it was right.

Both shows play about with time in that they, broadly, show us something and then go back to a point before it. In this Other Show, it was for effect. In Poker Face, it’s like Columbo+. On the first go through, we see the murder and the events leading up to it. Then we’re back toward the start but following the story of our lead character as she becomes involved with perhaps the victim, perhaps the murderer. It’s a way of adding another layer of context and often tragedy.

Plus it means although we don’t see her any sooner than we see Lt Columbo (Peter Falk) n his series, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is not an impartial outsider coming in after the fact. She’s embroiled in it.

The key thing is this bit of going back in time and it’s about how you tell the audience that this has happened. Given that the first audience is the people who read the script, it becomes how do you say on the page that this has happened.

In the Other Series, the script sets a scene and actually asks us “When?” Before saying “Well, we’ll be wondering exactly that as we…” And it cuts to another scene.

Later: “And just like that — WE ARE CAUGHT UP TO THE TOP OF OUR STORY.”

Here’s how it’s written in the script to Poker Face by Ryan Johnson.

We’ll have plenty of time and cues over the next few scenes to
recognize her and realize we’ve flashed back in time, no need to get it immediately.

That’s it. Just telling us straight, no fuss, no capital letters.

Like I said, both shows got made. And surely this is all personal taste since the two writers of the Other Show just really, really like peppering the script with what I’d call unnecessary detail and I imagine they’d call setting a tone. (“Oh, that’s interesting,” goes one stage direction. Not particularly.)

A script is not meant to be read by the audience, it is a blueprint for the final show. But Poker Face is a better read on the page, I feel, because it gets on with things. The tone is in the story and the dialogue, the life is in the characters rather than the stage directions.

It’s only as I wrote that last paragraph that I realise this, for me, ties me back to when Alan Plater told me that my stage directions made him laugh, but now I need to get that into the dialogue instead.

I think we can say, then, that whether or not I’m able to implement it, I did learn the lesson.

I do not expect to be remembered when I’ve left a room and I cannot conceive that you would read something just because it had my name on it. But earlier this week, an ad agency used that name of mine to boost its Google SEO ratings because I am apparently that much of a draw.

Well, okay, this much of a draw: the company stole the names of maybe two dozen writers better known than I am. It put them against articles that were nicked from other websites but given a once-over by AI to make them sound worse. Each of us got a bio and a photograph, again seemingly both generated by AI.

I’m a little twitchy that the bio for me made me sound the single most boring man in the land and so AI can be uncannily accurate sometimes. But the face it gave me. Gormless. Bewildered.

Okay, yes, very funny, stop that. But the man in the photo was also young. You’ve run out of smart remarks now, haven’t you?

So have I, really. I was a bit shaken by it all. I thought about asking the Writers’ Guild for advice, but I said I was only this much of a draw: everyone else was far more significant in their field, and seemingly far louder. I think it might have been a timezone thing, too, as they were yelling legals about this before I even woke up.

But at some point quite quickly, “William Gallagher” was renamed to something generic and the problem, or at least that problem, was gone.

I get why it bothered me so much but I also don’t get why it bothered me so much. I have that whole thing about not being remembered, so I don’t see why an alternative version of me would matter.

I rather like not mattering. I’ve produced an event that’s running this Monday night and I was trying to explain to one of the people fronting it that I enjoy both having made it happen and not being seen to have made it happen. She knows, the rest of the gang knows, the star of the event knows, but I’ll be at the back of the room along with attendees who have no reason to imagine I had anything to do with it.

Someone once described me as wanting to be an invisible writer, that I wanted the work to be centre stage and anything about me just is just a blockage in the way. I relished and cherished that.

So please explain. I believe I am an invisible writer who doesn’t make any impact in a room and quite happily does not matter at events — yet I’m telling you about the event, I’m shaking at being impersonated online, I have an entire bloody YouTube channel with my face on it, and I write to you every week while never once asking how you are.

I read hundreds Doctor Who-related scripts so you don’t have — no, wait, you do have to. Of course you do. This is at the very least a silver mine with more than 200 hours of drama screenplays. For free.

It’s also a growing list. I want to thank Mark Braxton for telling me about them first and then I want to thank you because in going back to check the list to write about it here, I found around 30 more had been added.

So now there are 254 scripts online, ranging across most of the 2005-2023 Doctor Who seasons, plus Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, and a couple more related shows. Read them all: it is the most enormous treat and I’d like to say it’s given me countless hours of pleasure, but presumably you can count it and you’d get a figure of no more than 254.

But if you are going to dip into the selection, please indulge me. I really have had a brilliant time reading the set but here are the ten that I especially want to run up to you to enthuse about.

Except…

You need to know a couple of things that limited my choice.

1) The set online is not complete. It is growing and at present the biggest last gap is Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor Who season, of which there are just two scripts online. But there was a book of them all in 2005.

2) Some of the scripts are post-production versions that look to me like Programme as Broadcast (PasB) administration forms. You can ignore a lot of the admin detail like the timing of music cues, but for a whole set during Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker’s era, the available scripts are deeply hard to read. Dialogue has been moved to reflect when a character is seen, even if that’s before the script introduces them. And there are sections where dialogue and scene descriptions are borderline unreadable. Many times, I had to go watch a bit of an episode to understand what was intended. Consequently, there are no Jodie Whittaker-era scripts here: this list is entirely based on what scripts are a great read on the (available) page.

• There are no Ncuti Gatwa-era scripts either. The only aired episode script available is for the Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road and it didn’t quite make my top ten. Although the very short Fifteenth Doctor’s audition script only dropped out at the last hour.

• Many scripts are two-, three- or more-parters and for the purposes of this rigorous statistical analysis, I’m counting each of those as just one single script.

• I didn’t always look for or notice the writer’s name until after I’d enjoyed the script. Now I have, I am as startled to see how few women writers there are in my top ten as I am to see how few women writers have worked on Doctor Who. It’s insane.

Now, finally, my top 10.

10. Doctor Who: The Girl Who Died by Jamie Mathieson and Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived by by Cath Tregenna
I remember being annoyed by the title “The Girl Who Died” until I heard of the next part, “The Woman Who Lived”. That meant this wasn’t the usual use of “girl” in a title to mean a woman, and to mean the script was written by a man.

On the page, this is a pair of adventures and there is such pain, especially in the second half, that it again makes me envy the imagination of the writers.

9. Doctor Who: Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead by Steven Moffat
This two-parter starts with a totally impossible opening, which is just all the more delightful because of that impossibility — which then becomes entirely possible, entirely reasonable. To me, it’s an example of how shockingly imaginative modern Doctor Who is and how deep into the character of the Doctor it is able to go. The Doctor should be a cliche hero who knows everything, but in the best stories a depth to him is yanked up to the surface for us to see.

8. Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor by Richard Curtis
I don’t believe you can read this script and not cry.

7. Torchwood: Out of Time by Catherine Treganna
Torchwood was a very variable show but this episode appeared to be that standard thing of a regular character falling in love with a guest star who we know we’ll never see again, yeah, yeah, or that next week there’ll be a different love interest. But on the page, you feel the attraction, and if the guest does disappear, it’s upsetting rather than a plot convenience.

6. Doctor Who: Midnight by Russell T Davies
I am a complete sucker for contained dramas, stories that take place in confined spaces. Doctor Who has done many of them over the years — I’ve even written a couple of them for Big Finish myself — but Midnight is special. Above everything else in this world, I love the one-hour TV drama form, and never more so than when my entire, my entire attention is in the story, to the exclusion of anything else whatsoever. Just for an hour. Just while I’m being taken somewhere and I only feel where we’re going when it comes to a perfect end.

5. Doctor Who: The Girl in the Fireplace by Steven Moffat
I’m actually a sucker for a lot of things, it turns out, and several are in this. For one thing, it’s a romance and a thriller — come have a coffee and let me talk to you for hours about how I believe those two genres are practically identical — but it also really uses its form. This is a story that could not be told in any other show, not one single other series, not in this way, and to me that shows both mastery of a series and also demonstrates why we need this show. I am also definitely an anti-sucker for the use of the word “Girl” in a title, but in this case the character actually does start out as a girl, so.

4. The Sarah Jane Adventures: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? Part 1 and Part 2 by Gareth Robert’s
I have not one thin clue how I missed The Sarah Jane Adventures when it aired, but a particular treat of this collection of scripts was how all five series of the show are here. There are some episodes that feel forced, but overall it’s both exciting and — to me — unexpectedly moving. Possibly no more so than in this two-part story.

3. Doctor Who: Blink by Steven Moffat
This is the only entry that I feel is a bit unfair. I surprised myself with some choices and some of the sequence, but I know Blink suffered because the script has been online for years and I must’ve read it five times by now.

2. Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour by Steven Moffat
Just believe for 20 minutes. The best television drama takes you somewhere but only rarely this far into what for any other series would be practically farcical yet while you’re reading or watching is entirely reasonable. Sheer imagination again, such incredible pace and — this is far from always the case with Doctor Who — an ending that lands satisfyingly.

1. Torchwood: Children of Earth by Russell T Davies, John Fay and James Moran
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5
I obviously enjoyed reading all of the scripts in this top ten and in the entire Whoniverse, but out of more than 250 scripts, this set of five parts was fantastically compelling from start to the very satisfying finish. I do remember liking it hugely when I saw it air, but all memory of that viewing was pushed out of my head as I raced, raced, raced through the scripts, not just held, not just relishing them, but practically frantic to read what happens next.

Just by sheer statistics, you wouldn’t — or at least I wouldn’t — have guessed that a non-Doctor Who script would top my list. But then equally, yes, I knew this one would. It was reading this particular set of scripts that made me want to rush up to you with them all. So I’m still surprised, but equally not surprised at all.

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.