Surprise and Demand

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Last night I was laughing at the script to an episode of The Detectorists. Really shaking, weeping, guffawing. This kind of couch behaviour gets noticed when someone else is trying to watch The Doctor Blake Mysteries. But then it leads to information in the many ad breaks on the Alibi channel.

Toby Jones co-stars in The Detectorists and my wife Angela Gallagher, who has the most amazing knowledge of casts, told me that he’s just become patron of Claybody Theatre, the tremendous company founded by Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson.

So far this is all current, topical, present-day stuff but then she tells me that Toby Jones is the son of Freddie Jones and I am instantly right back to the mid-1970s when I was a child watching him in The Ghosts of Motley Hall by Richard Carpenter.

You’ve had this, you’ve been thrown back to something and doubtlessly someone watching Motley Hall at the time was drawn to remember seeing Freddie Jones in 1967’s Far from the Madding Crowd.

Only, that 1970s viewer being reminded of a 1960s film could do nothing more than be reminded of it. Whereas no sooner than Doctor Blake had saved the day than we were actually watching the first episode of The Ghosts of Motley Hall.

It’s far from true that any film or show you can think of is available for you to watch immediately, but it feels as if it is. Last week I bought the first seasons of St Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues. Earlier this week, a friend was looking for recommendations for something to watch before her Amazon Prime trial ran out and I spent an hour trying to find the name of something I’d relished on it.

An hour.

It took forty seconds to go from Doctor Blake to a 1976 episode of Motley Hall but an hour to get a film –– solely because I couldn’t remember its name. Even when I did find it and I did recommend it to my friend, I knew I’d forget the title again so I just bought it on iTunes.

That was Your Sister’s Sister by writer/director Lynn Shelton and it is more than worth the hour I spent looking. Not only because I relish that film and have just watched it again, but also because my prodding searches online for what detail I could recall of this film also turned up a movie called My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. Now, I know that movie under another title, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, and it’s one I delight in that’s written and directed by Eric Rohmer.

We are at the stage where a stray recollection is instantly satisfied. Where a small whim is filled in a thrice. And where to find something to watch, you no longer use Radio Times, you use Google.

It makes my mind split in two different directions. One is to think that who has time for broadcast telly any more? Television is like a delivery mechanism now, it’s a way of getting Fleabag ready for us. Television and film have become the libraries we dip into instead of the live, shared experience it was.

I can’t help but lament how everyone, simply everyone, watched when André Previn was on The Morecambe and Wise Show. Yet I can’t help but adore the fact that everyone, simply everyone, can watch that segment right now.

Well, that link is to a site called Dailymotion which currently thinks that after watching a 1971 Morecambe and Wise sketch I will want to see Miley Cyrus topless. The internet, eh?

And, well, there isn’t half an issue about the rights to this and all these creators not being paid while sites are getting ad revenue from showing them. That’s enormous. I bought My Sister’s Sister, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Hill Street Blues and St Elsewhere but if Motley Hall is available to buy, I don’t know because I just saw it on YouTube.

The other direction my mind goes in, though, is this. Motley Hall was 43 years ago. When Peter Tork died recently, I watched the first episode of The Monkees and that was 53 years ago.

Imagine being back then in 1966 and able to watch anything you liked from 1913. Or living in 1913 and being able to watch something from 1860.

We have an unprecedented, unimaginable, incomprehensible ability to instantly taste our own culture as it was during the last half a century. Well, okay, we’re all chiefly locked to our own nation’s culture: it presumably is possible to do the same and watch any film from, say, India’s last five decades but I don’t know how to do it and those movies would be a sea to me without any markers or references or memories.

And of course this ability is locked to films and television, occasionally some radio. It only shows you what was being shown, it doesn’t really take you back in time. Except that of course it does: The Ghosts of Motley Hall has an innocence I can miss and a slow pace we lack today too.

Equally, On the Buses is about to be released on DVD for its fiftieth anniversary. The only thing more certain that this show captured its time is that I ain’t going to watch it.

We all make things for now, I don’t think anyone makes drama or comedy with much of an eye to the future beyond possible sales to different broadcasters and platforms. Yet this is mass of visual work is making me conscious both of how anything I make must be unconsciously imbued with the time that I make it –– and of how we must surely run out of room some day.

Maybe we’ll have to move to Mars just because there’s no more space to store all the episodes of NCIS.

Or videos of Miley Cyrus.

The Plumb Pudding in Danger

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Maybe as much as thirty years ago, I came across a political cartoon called “The Plumb Pudding in Danger” and I have wanted to use that as a title ever since.

Last Monday, I did.

It’s so long since I found that image that I can’t remember what I was doing or even much about it: I have to refer to my own script in order to tell you that it shows Napoleon and William Pitt the Younger carving up the world which is depicted as a plumb pudding.

James Gillray’s The Plumb Pudding in Danger (1805)

I had that image projected onto the wall at The Door theatre in the Birmingham Rep as part of Bad Choices, a night of plays by Cucumber Writers. Even if you’re as historically ill-informed as I am, you can see that cartoon is an ancient thing and I needed there to be no doubt that the play was present-day. So I had it as if it were on the wall of the office the play is set in – and next to it I had an image of Theresa May.

Or as the script says: “Theresa May or whoever is Prime Minister when we stage this.”

I wrote all this in the script and no doubt whoever directed the play would’ve had the images shown as described, but in this case that was me. I directed it.

It was my first time directing an evening of theatre so it was first proper time as a hyphenate. A writer-director.

Only, I also then ended up producing.

And as my Plumb Pudding script has a character who you only hear over speakers, I also acted the part offstage with a microphone.

Writer-director-producer-actor.

Just go back over those words, would you? How far through do you get before it stops sounding impressive and instead starts to seem a bit cheap?

It is fascinating, though, to briefly hold all these different perspectives in your head. I was sitting in the audience for most of the evening, more aware and more conscious, more in the moment than I can easily recall. Each beat of each play, examined. Each reaction from the audience.

It makes you oddly dispassionate, or at least it did me. So for instance, I think as a producer I fell short because I took my eye off the ball about promoting the evening enough. I concentrated on the material and making it happen. As a writer, I was good but there’s one character in my piece that I need to work on. As an actor, I was adequate on a microphone but if I’d actually shared the stage with my cast, I’d have been blown away.

And as a director, I was strong on the short plays and very clear about what I wanted, very able – I believe – to have everyone contributing. But we also had two poems in the mix and there I was out of my depth. I could direct some stagecraft, I could direct about pacing and where to aim or emphasise certain parts, but otherwise it was a poem. It rhymes, I thought. And that was my extent of expertise in it.

Those poems were by Rupi Lal. The other plays that I directed were by Louise Marshall and Emma Davis. There was one more play by Matthew Warburton that he brought in pre-directed so I could just relish watching that one.

He starred in his one with Kath Waters. My cast was Alan Wales, Deb McEwan and Dru Stephenson.

My co-producer was Angela Gallagher.

And if you want an night of theatre doing, these are the people you must get. I still and will always believe that it has to be on the page, but there were a hundred moments during rehearsals when I’d stop to just marvel at what the cast were doing with the material.

There were also a hundred thousand moments beforehand where I was sick to my stomach at the entire prospect of directing. But only you know that and as far as anyone else is concerned, when can I do it again?

Poet-time lover

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I need to say this first. If you’re near Birmingham next Monday evening, February 18, 2019, then do come to Bad Choices at the Birmingham Rep. It’s an evening of new plays and poetry by Cucumber Writers and as well as having written one of the pieces, I’m also directing. It’s my first evening directing stage so a friendly face would be really good.

It’s 20:00 on Monday 18 February, 2019, at The Door in the Birmingham Rep. There’s no need to book and there’s no ticket price, just a big bucket on your way out. Details here on the Rep’s Open Door page.

Now, it’s funny that this evening should feature poetry because I would’ve told you that this is the one form of writing I can’t do. Not true: I also cannot do sports reporting, though that’s for want of trying.

I haven’t written the poems in this evening and as I speak to you I’ve little clue how to direct them, but I’ll figure it out.

And I’m particularly looking forward to that because this show comes after the Verve Poetry Festival and that’s where I was yesterday. Verve is an especially fine poetry festival held in Birmingham and it turns out to be rather joyously welcoming world. As much as I like reading poetry, I don’t write it and there is this entire eco-system of poems and poets that I know nothing about.

Quick story? I was talking with this fella the other month and he was asking which side I was on in a truly huge fight that was going in poetry. He didn’t use those words, I can’t remember what phrase he did use but he’s a poet, it would’ve been good. If he had called it a truly huge fight, though, I would’ve looked as blank as I actually did and said: a truly huge fight – in the poetry world?

It was big. Sorry, I’ve forgotten what it was now. This is a rubbish story. But there are these worlds and there are these universes and they’re moving around us, just waiting to be spotted and joined.

We all have feet in many different worlds and amongst mine there’s always been a technology one. I remain deaf and blind to recitations of technical specifications, but wide open to how technology can help me in my writing and all of my work.

Two things surprised me about peeking into poetry through the Verve Festival and one was this. I’m not alone with the technology side of it all. The faces of poets glow these days because so many of them are using iPads or iPhones. There is something oddly extra intimate about seeing someone read a piece off their phone: it’s like they’re sharing something even more personal than off some paper.

And the other thing that surprised me is that poet Helen Calcutt ran a workshop during which she ended up getting me to write a poem that deeply upsets me. She hasn’t seen it, you’re not going to see it, I make no claim to great poetic talent, but it’s a day later and just thinking about it is enough to punch me.

When you use words all the time, you can forget that they’re powerful.

Verve is on until February 17. Cucumber’s Bad Choices night is February 18.

Fit and finish

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I’m not a planner. Well, I am with projects and I’ll plan writing so that I don’t miss deadlines. Also, when required to, I can outline a story or script. Plus, there have been times when I have had to plan a story just to get it clear in my head or knock it out fast enough for a producer. And I’ve planned hundreds of events, I’m a planner there even if I doubt any of those talks or workshops or sessions has ever stuck very closely to the plan.

But apart from all events and certain stories and every commission and most projects, I’m not a planner.

I prefer to just start writing and see where it takes me. Now, if you do this, if you are stupid enough to do this, you are obligated to know that you’ll be writing rubbish. You have to know that you will – and I have – written a hundred thousand words of which you then throw away ninety thousand.

I think that’s a bargain. You get ten thousand words you’re happy with and all it costs is ninety thousand you’re not. I’ll take those odds and I have, many times.

But I feel as if I’ve talked a lot with you about fairly bleak things lately and I want instead to tell you something about all this that makes me happy. Very happy.

This will take a sec.

Often – maybe always – you’re reaching the end of a script, a story or even an article and you know you need something. I think you know what I mean and I’m certain that I can’t define it any better than this. There is just something more you need. A moment, a character, a thought. Even a plot point. It’s something that, if you get it right, is the final part that turns a piece from a string of words into a story.

And the thing I so adore is that sometimes – just sometimes – you realise you’ve already got it.

Something you wrote earlier in the piece was clearly there solely so that you could call it back, so you could pick it up, so you could build on it, so it could create some kind of harmonic. You didn’t do it deliberately and you haven’t been working to make it fit the end but it’s so right that it is as if you did and you always knew it was the finish.

It’s crucial to me both that it can perfectly do this thing for the end but also that I set it up so thoroughly and completely unconsciously.

As I say, it only happens sometimes but it is inexpressibly wonderful when it does. I feel clever, I feel daft, I feel satisfied.

And the reason I’m telling you now is that I’ve had the biggest, greatest, most unexpected one of these.

I shouldn’t say it, really, since I haven’t yet written the end that so gave me this feeling. But I will. Because I can’t fail to tell you everything and because I have a collection of short stories coming out and I was looking at a tiny moment in one of the tales.

It’s really small. It is completely unimportant and it only keeps its place in the story because it’s what this particular character would say at that particular time.

I’ve easily re-read this part a hundred times during the preparation of the manuscript, quite likely more.

And yet this time when I read it, I knew.

He says this thing because it is also part of another story.

There wasn’t going to be another story, there are already ten in the set and they are long done but now there has to be another one. It is complete, or it will be, and it is of itself, you will not have to have read the first take.

But if you have, I think this incredibly small moment will make the book complete.

You will not be able to guess which story came first and you will not know that I didn’t do it deliberately. Plus I didn’t know this but the book would not have been complete with this tale which I am compelled to write, which demands to be in the collection.

‘Course, it could turn out rubbish and I could end up dropping it from the book.

I don’t plan these things.

Not the most right I’ve ever been

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I’ve been in a lot of discussions lately about how we all, but especially writers, talk very loudly about anything you could possibly call a success and stay silent about everything else. It’s not as if everyone else is rooting for you to fail, but it is that the curated good news boast has consequences. There is the ever-present risk of being boring, which is not to be ignored, but also most of us are not succeeding most of the time.

So when you’re exposed to constant hurrahs and your own writing isn’t going anywhere, you get split between pleased for whoever it is and, well, not pleased for yourself. Then five minutes later, the successful person suddenly isn’t successful at the moment and they go through the same range of feelings as you just did.

I know this, I knew this, but I did not appreciate how much it can affect people. I knew how it affected me but we all think something is just us and we don’t appreciate the scale of it. We especially don’t appreciate how amplified all this is on social media, or at least I didn’t.

A conclusion that every one of these recent discussions has come up with is that we should talk about our failures as well as our successes. How we should be more honest.

I’m going to be more honest with you. It appears that I can’t quite make it all the way to total, bare honesty, so instead of flat-out admitting I was wrong and that something has failed, I’ve had to first try setting the scene like this. Don’t think of me as a complete failure, think of me as a hero for revealing those failings.

If you would like to stop reading now, I would appreciate it if you took away with you the belief that I am a mensch.

If you’re not coming back and you also promise never to check, you could take away the belief that I am roguishly handsome, too.

My name is William and I haven’t written scripts for thirty minutes every day this year.

That was my big drive for 2019 and it follows last year’s push to read more scripts. Curiously enough, now that script reading vow is over, I’ve accidentally carried that one on and actually have read a script every day anyway. If I do it again today, after we’ve talked here, then my total for the year will be 133 scripts read.

But only 26 days of scriptwriting every day.

I could make excuses and I don’t really see any way either of us can stop me. So there was a kind of holiday day or three, which was complicated. There were some days when I was working to midnight and then up for the next thing at 4am, which was exhausting. And there was a friend dying, which was shit.

Right now I’m five days behind on this vow. There’s a bit of me that thinks I can make up that time in the sense of doing, say, an hour a day for a while. And there’s a bit of me that thinks I can make up that time in the sense of just pretending to you that I’ve done it.

But I think the thing to do here and probably every time either of us fail to do something, is to forget the past, forget thinking about what we haven’t done, and instead go do something now.

Not reading scripts at all, no

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I still can’t really tell you her name. Thank you for the thoughts and comments about last week where I told you of a friend who’s died. I was touched, I kept pressing my hand to my chest as I read. And now we’ve just got to get through her funeral.

In the meantime, since you’ve been so nice, I’m going to regret what happens next. I’m going to tell you something insufferable. I have to tell you now while it’s still true and I promise that I’m going to be as annoyed at me as you are, but maybe that’ll spur me on.

It’s not the same thing but I am reminded of a tweet recently where Inc. magazine claimed that “the world’s most successful people start their day at 4am” – and JK Rowling replied with simply “Oh, piss off”.

Previously… I have belaboured here how I read 600-odd scripts last year. (For the record, it was 624 by New Year’s Eve.) I said that I didn’t know what to do this year, but presumably after all that reading, it should be writing.

This is what I decided. I would write scripts for half an hour every day in 2019, regardless of what else I was doing. Even if the day’s job was actually scriptwriting, I would do half an hour of a different script Every Single Day.

And this is the insufferable part that could fail at any moment. I have done. I know it’s only 25 January as I write to you, but I’ve done it 24 times so far. Once I think it was the first thing I did in a morning, before I started on various commissions. Once for certain it was 1am the next morning, after I’d finished a thing.

This did mean I finished my script for Bad Choices, an evening of plays at The Door in the Birmingham Rep next month by Cucumber Writers, and I’m going to be directing that night too. So that was useful, that was necessary, and because it had a deadline, it was also obvious that I would have to do it and this made the half-hour-a-day easier than it might’ve been.

Other than that, I dramatised one of my own short stories for no reason at all. Except that having turned a 2,000-word story into a 15-minute script, I discovered two new characters. Well, at least one of them is mentioned in the story but he’s now actually talking in the script along with another new one. I like them both so much that I may go back to add them to the prose story.

And you know how when you’re thinking of something, you see it everywhere. I’ve been thinking about scriptwriting and there was a discussion on Facebook about the best books on the subject. I’m not convinced there are any, really, as ones that tell you how to write tend to actually be telling you how that author writes. Since you’ve never heard of the author, they don’t appear to have written very well or at least not very successfully.

Yet there are books that I definitely like which are somehow on the periphery. They’re not how-to books but they are ones that help.

Such as the one I surprised myself by throwing in to that Facebook discussion. I recommended the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion by Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block.

It is one of the very, very many books about the making of one of the very, very many Star Trek series. But it has a couple of thousand words about every single episode of the seven-year show and about eighty percent of that is about the writing. Most of it is very informative about the thinking behind a television series: the writers go into detail, for instance, about why a certain character was created and what the aim was.

Then there are many times when the writers are proud of their show and they tell you so – but at least as often, there are points when they are brutal. Yes, this character was brought in to do this but it didn’t work because we didn’t do this or we did do that. “What were we thinking?” they say of one episode.

It’s a fascinating read. It’s not an easy read because there is just so much and it’s a very hefty book to be carrying around to read between meetings. But it is very good.

Except for one thing.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is on Netflix so you could read about any episode and then go watch it. Except it’s a lot faster to read the scripts.

Yes. I skipped the first season because I remember the writing getting better from the second. But in this year of no longer reading a script per day, I have accidentally now read 81 of them.

Told you. Insufferable. Although I’ll say it now as I did last year, there are days when hiding away from the world in a good script or ten is very appealing.

What you leave behind

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More than anything, I want to talk to you about a friend who’s just died. I want to do it and I need to do it and I’m not going to, not this week. Not when I believe there are friends and I know there are colleagues of hers who haven’t heard yet.

It’s not as if I expect them to be reading this but if the possibility is tiny, still the risk is too great and it is magnified by the fact that she took her own life. I type that and yet again I’m thinking no, I’m wrong, it’s a mistake, she can’t have done.

And then I am looking at you right now but I’m also seeing her the last time we had a coffee, the last time I worked with her.

It’s just so difficult to think of anything else. I started the week at the Writers’ Guild Awards and, oh, there can surely never have been a more happy event – at least since last year’s one. A joyous, bouncing, happy room. I wasn’t up for any awards yet there were some results I actually cheered as loudly as if they had been for me.

Funny, you try to go far away from the topic that’s on your mind and sometimes you’re just heading toward the same thing in a different way.

For I told you I wasn’t up for any awards. That did make for a relaxing night, but sitting there, surround by a couple of hundred of the finest writers in the world, it made me feel that I wasn’t doing enough.

And my friend is never going to finish writing the book we talked about.

We don’t get long here and if we’re fortunate enough to know what we want to do, we need to go do it now.

I was wrong

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Last year, I made a big deal of the fact that I read 640 or so scripts. I generously offered you ten lessons that I’d learned and, while I didn’t say this at the time, it was difficult enough to come up with ten that I figured I had found them all. I had learned all there was to learn.

Give me this: when I’m wrong, I’m thorough about it.

For now that I don’t have this resolution, now that 2018 is over and I am no longer reading a script a day, I’ve relaxed and only read some 41 more of them so far this month. And number 38 went against at least many of my ten lessons.

I won’t tell you what the script was because I want to work on the series some day. But I will tell you this: the reason I read numbers 39, 40 and 41 right after it was because 38 had put me into a foul mood and I wanted to clear my head.

Didn’t work. Let me tell you as an aside, to make up for not naming this script and to hopefully be of some use instead of just grumbling at you, that number 39 was an episode of I’m Alan Partridge (book). Then 40 and 41 were a two-part Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story. (The Search part 1 and part 2.)

All three are good. Still didn’t help. I went to bed annoyed and I’m ratty again today.

Chiefly because this script is for a show I saw early last year and had enjoyed on screen. On the page, it was irritating. I’ve said that actors, directors and producers can make a poor script seem okay but they will never make it great. That was one of my ten lessons and yet now there’s this. Maybe the show made from this script wasn’t exactly fantastic, but it was very, very good.

Good enough that I was excited when a friend sent me the script.

On the page, all I can see is how hard the cast had to work to make this dialogue sound natural. When I remembered how the actors delivered a line, I could see how they got there but otherwise it just wasn’t on the page. Good dialogue doesn’t make sense and isn’t grammatically correct yet there’s a way to write it so that when you read it on the page, you hear how it should be spoken and you believe it. You believe this is what a real person would say.

In this script, there was none of this. Dialogue was just a mash of words that you had to unpick.

All of the ideas that I’d so liked in the finished show are right here in the script yet somehow they’re carelessly half-hidden.

I think this is what has left me in a bad mood. This felt careless. It really isn’t, it really cannot be, yet that’s how it reads. I think what I’m struggling to reach is a thought that this script was written by someone who doesn’t care about scriptwriting. I’m certain they care about television drama and I will always agree with them that a script is just a blueprint for a show.

I’m guessing now, but a typical television series script will only be actually read by perhaps a hundred people. Maybe two hundred at the absolute outside. What’s more, every one of those readers is a professional who has worked on drama before. This script had all the information each one of them needed to do their jobs. And the end result worked very well on screen so the only sane conclusion is that I’m an idiot.

Only, this is writing. By a writer. You may well not like what I write but it isn’t casually thrown off, it isn’t careless. I’ll never know if I’m any good but I do know that there is a certain standard that I can’t slip below. If I write crap, it isn’t the writing that’s so bad, it isn’t the technique or the skill or the care.

I think the conclusion you’re helping me reach is that the writer of this script is not a good writer – and yet he does make a good television drama.

I didn’t think that was possible. I’ve said it isn’t possible. And even now, right this moment, right here talking to you, I still believe that it isn’t conceivably possible. But seemingly it is.

I don’t especially mind being wrong. What I mind is that I’d say this script was bad and yet the show was good.

This kept me awake.

Thanks for being my therapist today, I owe you. Now, I’m off to read another script and to write one too.

Thinking and not thinking

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I have no idea who I am today. Could I be you for a bit? We could swap. I’d get your brains, your style, your general good looks and you’d get… give me a minute.

Um.

It’s too late to say you’d get my ability to be quick-witted, isn’t it?

At least tell me that you’re as confused over what day it is as I am. Give me that. I look forward to talking with you but twice now I’ve actually had to ask Siri what day it is today. She has told me but I picture her backing away as she does so.

It’s not as if I’m still on holiday. It’s more that I’ve just reached the point where I’ve stopped resisting relaxation and have begun to enjoy it, to need it, and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do it. There is actually a part of me that likes how tomorrow is a weekend. I don’t usually notice those very much, but this time I’ll try to relax as we take down the Christmas decorations that we put up about half an hour ago.

The way we’ve rigged the decorations this year, we’ll start by saying aloud “Hey, Siri, turn the Christmas lights off” and that will seem so final.

Are you ready for the year? Right now it feels like a mountain.

Somehow also a familiar mountain and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Maybe we could swap mountains. What if we have different shaped mountains? What if yours is so big that when you took on mine instead, it would feel to you like a chance to everest?

Yeah, quick-witted is gone.

I have already agreed to direct a show. And I’ve written a twenty-minute theatre script that right now looks technically impossible to produce. And I followed through my un-resolution where I stopped reading a script every day, except for one I had to do for work and the now dozen others that I accidentally fell into.

It’s only January 3 and there is so much to do, so much to look forward to, but I’d really like you and I to just have a hot chocolate together and postpone our efforts for a little while. What do you say?

Script pages

My 10 lessons from reading 620 scripts

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Late in December 2017 I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site that suggested reading one script a day. And I thought yep, good idea. I would read a script every day for a year. Now it’s 28 December 2018 and when you and are done today, I’m going to go read my 621st.

I am surprised that it turned out to be so many but I was more surprised by how many people have asked why I was doing it. Just to keep this surprise line going a little further, I obviously wasn’t even mildly startled that I learned some things from these scripts. But I was and am shocked at how they changed through the year. Or rather, how I did.

I kept a list so that I didn’t repeat any – and with the idea that a growing list would keep me at it. And now I can look at any entry and tell you where I was, what I was doing or going through, and how I felt. Plus I can tell you about almost any script: there are a couple where I nearly did read them again because I’d forgotten about ’em.

Sometimes, I’ll fully admit, they were a chore. They were a job to be done in the last moments of the day. Other times they were a joy and the first thing I did before breakfast. You could’ve guessed at that, especially as I went so far over the one-per-day idea. What I didn’t guess is that sometimes they were an escape. Occasionally, on some supremely bad days, they were even a refuge.

And then there would be times, so many times, when I’d read something that was extraordinary and I’d know that I will never write that well.

Doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.

While I do that, while I crack knuckles, let me please tell you the ten things I believe I learned from reading these scripts.

10. It’s got to be there on the page
I’ve seen actors lift a piece, most especially including one of my two staged shorts this year, but there’s a limit. Very talented actors and directors can make a poor script seem okay, but it will never be good on its feet if it isn’t at all on the page.

9. Just because it’s on the page, it might not make it to screen
Conversely, I have seen the opposite happen. I’m sorry, I can’t remember which one it was now, but I read a sitcom script that I really enjoyed and then watched the aired episode. Jokes that had worked on the page simply didn’t on screen. Characters I liked as I read, I then didn’t as I watched, And somehow it all felt amateur.

I couldn’t leave you hanging. I’ve just searched. It was a US comedy called Happy Endings. I must be in the minority because it ran for a couple of seasons.

Still, I’m minded of Coupling. Once for BBC News Online I watched the pilot of the US remake of that show and then immediately watched the pilot of the original. There was some joke in the UK version that made me laugh aloud and was in the US one, in exactly the same point in the episode, and I hadn’t even realised it was a joke at all.

8. When writing and production work, there’s nothing like it
All this reading and I know even more so than I did before that cast and direction is crucial. Dammit.

There’s a scene in a Homicide: Life on the Street script that is so bare bones, so on-the-nose with people saying what they mean, that at least part of it could’ve been in a soap. Yet there on the page, you got why soap isn’t drama. This wasn’t simplistic or simplified, it was raw. You felt for these characters.

And then I watched the episode and felt it even deeper. No theatrics, no special effects, just pain transmitted into us from a superbly real character played perfectly.

Do give it a read. Homicide: Life on the Street: Every Mother’s Son. Teleplay by Eugene Lee, story by Tom Fontana & James Yoshimura. It was directed by Ken Fink and while that description I just gave you could apply to many characters in the episode, I’m thinking of the character Mary Nawls, played by Gay Thomas Wilson.

7. The first ten pages rule is bollocks
Some writers bleat on about how unfair it is that certain studios or production companies only read the first ten pages of your script. I’ve always known this is a fallacy: the argument is that the script gets really good after page 49. But if you are genuinely capable of making a script good after 50 pages but you can’t see it’s crap up to then, you’re not genuinely capable of writing.

Without exception, without one single exception, I have known from the opening page, the opening lines, whether a script was going to be good or not.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’ll like it, that I’ll enjoy it, but it means I know it works and is well done.

There is also the fact for the most part I chose the scripts I was going to read so you’d imagine I’d like them. It’s not as if I were picking at random or accepting anything sent to me. But then scripts were sent to me: during 2018 I was a judge on three separate awards panels and they were all about writing. I think maybe sixty of the scripts I read were nominees and I didn’t know anything about them in advance.

Didn’t make a difference. There were scripts I liked a lot but which abruptly shot themselves in the foot by the ending. There were others I slogged through because it was my job. But in each case, I knew whether there was going to be anything to like or admire or enjoy in each script and I knew right away.

6. Nobody gives a damn about writers and nor should they
Scripts about writers are death. If your lead character is struggling with writers’ block, well, boo fucking hoo.

5. Don’t be a smartarse
Alan Plater once told me that my stage directions made him laugh aloud – but that I should get that strength into dialogue instead. Then, when I did, he called it a great leap forward for writerkind. I did re-read one of my earliest scripts and it was dreadful for a thousand reasons, but one of them was that my stage directions were smartarse.

Again, I can’t remember which scripts I read this year that were like that and this time I won’t search because it feels cruel. But there was one that particularly sticks out. A location was described as being “the kind of house I’ll live in if this goes to four seasons”.

It was just a gag and it did the job of conveying the richness of the location but it jarred. Made me feel that the writer was more interested in the business than in the story.

4. You can lose anything, you can remove anything

I have always known this: the pilot to the sitcom Cheers is an extraordinary piece of work. I’ve seen it many times over the years but hadn’t read the script until now. I’d seen it so often that I would’ve been able to tell you in detail why it’s so good and I know I could even have quoted one of the jokes.

So it was somewhat surprising to find that the script has an extra character in it. When you’ve read the script and all her scenes, then you can actually see her in the finished episode. But every scene she was featured in and every line she said or was said to her is gone.

I’m sorry for the actor but it was the right choice. I’m sure it was only done because the episode was running long but it works better without her.


3. Script books are dead and possibly should be
I have a couple of hundred books with scripts and screenplays in but I stopped buying them years ago. In this 2018 reading, I did raid very many of those books and there are scripts that I would never have been able to get otherwise. But the internet has killed off the script book and that’s a good thing.


Scripts in books are always reformatted to get as much text on the page as possible and while format shouldn’t matter, it does. When you’re reading a script in the layout it was written, you get the pace right in your head.

Also, published scripts are almost always cleaned up. Mistakes are removed and often scenes cut from the final show are cut from the script too. Getting to read the script as it was when it was handed to the actors is infinitely better and we can thank the internet for that.

For television scripts, I recommend Lee Thomson’s TV Writing site, which is my favourite, plus The Script Savant and Script Slug

For films there’s Simply Scripts.

Otherwise for radio and theatre you’re stuck with searching for individual titles. Actually, for theatre I would and did still go to books.

2. Save us from transcripts
On the other hand, you won’t believe how vehemently I despise something else the internet has done. It has given a platform for people who slavishly copy down every word of a broadcast show or film. They then post these online and some of these bastards claim that their transcript is the script.

Forget seeing the writing as handed to the actors, these transcripts are literally every word uttered on screen – and nothing else. Not even who said it. Certainly not where they were. These transcripts are an unreadable mess and I would burn them.

One thing. I did come across the reverse. I found a script to an episode of UFO and the site hosting it called that a transcript. What they meant was that they had a paper copy of the original script and had typed it up. That was fine. Although, wow, UFO’s pilot episode is of its time. Roaringly sexist, 1970s to its hilt, you can’t believe adults said some of these words.

This might help: if you’re searching for a script online, make sure you specify PDF in your search. I don’t know why, but transcribers don’t appear to have grasped PDF yet so the odds are that any result you get back is a true script.

And the last, perhaps most important thing I learned from reading hundreds of scripts:

1. It’s a damn sight easier to read a script than to write one.
This year I’ve read 620 and written only three. Well, there’s a fourth that I’ve written but it turned out half the length it needs to be. And I’m writing another one now but it won’t be ready for the end of the year. I would like to point out that two of the three I wrote have been staged. And the third got me some promising conversations with TV companies.

I would like to now say that I’ll write a script per day in 2019 but I have this feeling that might not work out. There were already days in 2018 that were so tight for time that I read ten-minute Danger Mouse scripts just to keep the tally going. (They’re very good, though.)

I would also like to say for sure whether I’m going to carry on reading a script a day. It has become a habit but it is also a lot of work. And I did notice that my other reading fell off a cliff. Maybe I should read a novel a day. What do you think?