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.

Last Saturday was the final “Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway” and purely by chance, it was also the first one I’ve seen. I’m not sure where I’ve been on Saturday evenings since 2013, but it wasn’t that I was off somewhere criticising or avoiding the show. You can’t watch everything, and I just don’t happen to have tuned in.

Not ever, actually. Last Saturday I was somewhere that it was on and I caught it by chance. All of this sounds a bit sniffy, like I wouldn’t stoop so low, but as far as I can see from this one edition, it’s a sparklingly well-produced show, a fine example of variety television.

But it was at BBC Television Centre.

Sorry, no, it was at Television Centre. There’s a difference. Saturday Night Takeaway is an ITV show but it’s made at what was BBC TVC.

And I’m watching this, I’m watching how they say that for this last show they are taking over the whole of TVC, and I am shocked how painful it is. Right there behind the DJ is where I would have lunch sometimes with the Ceefax team. Just to the left of screen is where I came around a corner and found my Ceefax editor talking with my Radio Times magazine editor talking with my RadioTimes.com editor and apparently all three women having just that instant realised that I worked for each of them. Moments before I appeared.

Ant and Dec were in my home.

Yet I’ve actually lived in a few places, I don’t particularly feel this possessive about any of them. I think it’s the before-and-after sense, the peculiar way that TVC looks like it always did but is not like it ever was.

I keep coming back to this subject because it keeps coming back to me. But right now, today, I’m looking at it not that TVC is gone, not that these bastards are treading in my living room, but rather that it was a privilege to work there.

I believe it’s the people who make a place special, but usually I mean the people you know, the people you work with. In this case, in BBC Television Centre’s case, it is all of that plus the decades of amazing people living and breathing and working in those studios and those halls and those offices.

You can’t go back. But you can watch Ant and Dec perform there.

There is a thing I think is very clever in AI, which is to do with describing images for the visually impaired. I’ll always write an alt text label for an image, the text that screen readers will read out to users, but I tend to copy the caption I’ve written. So I’ll say “Banana” where AI will say “Photo of a blackening banana with a best-before date of yesterday.”

Only, I saw an example of this that has depressed me. I saw it on Twitter, it went by in a disappointed flash, I can’t seem to find it again, so maybe I’m wrong. Hopefully I’m wrong.

But it was an example of this thing of using AI to describe images and I believe the thrust of the example was that this was being done here without any bias or AI hallucination. That this description of the image was entirely and impressively accurate, entirely and reassuringly presented without presumption or bias.

The caption read: “Girl on a train, wearing a red hat and smiling at the camera.”

It was wrong. From word one.

I’m astoundingly bad at ages but this was an adult woman, it was not a girl. So by being without bias or presumption, what the makers of this AI tool meant was that it was without any bias other than their own. And none of us consider our biases as biases.

If AI is to become the useful tool that in fact it long ago did, and if it is going to work by systematically stealing information from everyone and everywhere, you would want it to not shriek out at you that its algorithm was written by men.

Brand new technology, same old problems.

Okay, I’ve been avoiding telling you this for a year, under the excuse that it involves a confidential mentoring thing I did. But the truth is that I’ve really been avoiding it because I cocked up. And a thing happened this week that reminded me of it.

So.

I can’t tell you the project — much as I want to because it was an excellent, excellent project that I was proud to be asked to contribute to, and because a separate mentoring part I did for it went very well. At least, I think it did, I know I had a good time and I believe I was of at least some use.

But I can’t tell you any of that because of this other part, my failure, and I most definitely can’t tell you any names. But since the only one you need to know is mine, I think we’re okay with that.

Previously on mentoring… I was booked for a certain number of hours working with a writer on anything she wanted, anything she was writing. She was part of a much bigger project, I was like an add-on extra, hardly important and certainly hour for hour I wasn’t a large part of her work.

Exactly halfway through the writing, though, I mean exactly to the minute, she told me she didn’t want any writing mentoring. Her writing was good enough, she said.

And that’s where I went wrong. Twice. In very quick succession. I realise that this first one is only my opinion, but in that opinion, her writing isn’t good enough. It’s not bad, or she wouldn’t have earned her place on this project, but there wasn’t any life to it, any verve, and there were specific things I had been going to suggest to her.

I didn’t say that.

Instead, I asked what else she was interested in and unfortunately it turned out to be something that I knew about. Or at least have quite a few years of experience in. So where I should have ended the mentoring, I offered to continue using what I knew. I did tell the project’s organisers, I wasn’t that idiotic, but I should have pulled out, taken the cancellation or reduction in the fee, all of that.

Only, I had been doing this other thing for a long time and I like it. So here was a chance to talk about a topic I enjoy. I’m a man, we can’t resist talking about topics we enjoy. I wanted her version to go as well as mine, for her to have as much fun and at least as much income from it.

And I would have said that the remainder of the sessions went well. There was one overriding issue that this writer kept starting new projects and abandoning them, she would not stick with anything. Except, that is, for one of her ideas. Unfortunately, that idea seemed to me to be necessarily limited, plus it had huge and neon-light-obvious problems ranging from the technical and editorial to practically even legal.

I did point all of those out and also that I thought her other latest idea was more promising, but I don’t think she listened to the legal worry and she positively refused to do anything about the technical side.

So that left editorial, and right or wrong, I thought I was on solid ground here after decades of doing little else.

As I say, the rest of the sessions went well, I thought I was useful, and when it was all over, when I’d been paid and the entire project was done, I checked in with her to see how things were going. That was when she told me that she hadn’t done anything I’d told her, that she wouldn’t do anything I’d said, that my ideas were stupid and that she knew better than me.

Mic drop.

Earlier this week she came back to me. She’s started yet another new project and wants to pick through my contacts list for people to help her.

I know I was wrong to continue the mentoring and you can definitely see I was wrong to check back in with her. But there is something I know I’m right about: when you’ve dropped the mic, you can’t pick it back up again.

I’ve got to change numbers to protect the guilty. So let me pretend that I recently read a script that included this line: “…and in 59 seconds the trap door will open and you will ALL DIE! Mwahaa ha ha hah!”

This is a case of redundancy in writing, and also just how much you can convey in so little. For instance, you didn’t need the maniacal laughter at the end, you already knew everything you needed to know about the character from the 59 seconds line. And that 59 seconds line is by itself enough to make you say oh, bollocks to this, what’s on the other channel?

I believe I did say something of that sort when I saw the show that was made from the script. But this week I pressed on reading the script because I am an idiot. It’s Occam’s razor: either I am looking to learn from why I don’t like a given script, or I’m an idiot.

Anyway. 59 seconds, or what the script actually said that I’ll never tell, but you get the idea, is just up there with Crap Numbers. There’s probably a Venn diagram to be made out of the set of numbers and the set of numbers that are crap. There should be a whole branch of mathematics on this — I mean, we’ve got Imaginary Numbers, there should be Crap Number Theory.

It would include the number of seconds before spaceships are in firing range, which is always an unnatural-sounding odd number, it’s always said by a character who prefers to say “Affirmative” instead of “Yeah, whatever”, and — this is law — the amount of time specified bears no relation to how much time it then takes for the weapons fire or the clever escape.

There would also be a subset for numbers in time travel films and TV series, because in trying to tell you what year the characters have travelled to, they actually tell you what year the show was made. If a character lands in 2079, the show was made in 1979. It is inviolate.

And then you get things like “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and while you ought to be wondering why it isn’t Seven Husbands for Seven Sisters, or maybe just The Brady Bunch, really your mind goes to how this is not going be a short film.

Nicholas Meyer’s novel and film about Sherlock Holmes and his chemical addiction does numbers well: it’s “The Seven Percent Solution”. Very clever. And “Quatermass II” can’t really be dissed because the title referred to the name of a ship in the story, but it will forever be dissed because it is a direct consequence of this that we now have The Fast and the Furious 19.

Then “24” was a good title, even if it’s really 24 minus ad breaks and loo stops. “Doctor Who” once had “42” which was a bit coloured by its overuse since Douglas Adams, but still you knew this was a nod to 24 and so therefore a thriller. “December, 1963” is a rubbish title for a song, but maybe that’s why we know it better as “Oh, What a Night”.

This is all on my mind chiefly because of this wretched script I read, but there is another reason. Earlier this week I admitted that consider myself a failure as a writer because I’ve only sort-of, just-about, kinda written television drama. I have written it, there is an episode of Crossroads that’s all mine, but doesn’t have my name on it. And the reason that television drama is so important to me is the number 60.

I know that it’s a long time since any hour drama was actually 60 minutes, and the man I was admitting all of this to had a very good point about how TV drama has changed radically since I first wanted to write it. But still, it’s the form. The hour.

The one-hour television drama slot is to me what I understand three-minute pop songs are to others.

I’m fascinated by how we got to it, how it was more common in the early days of television to have half hours. Or how during the early 2000s, networks experimented with going back to half hours. (For a time, in the week that an hour-long “Ally McBeal” episode would air, a thirty-minute edited version of the same episode would go out under the series title “Ally”. I did like that they even edited the title.)

At some point there was a similar thing done with Knight Rider, which is not a series known for its long dialogue scenes so is presumably easier to cut in half. Except it wasn’t. While I never saw either Ally or whatever they called the shorter Knight Rider, I know they were flops.

Television drama needs to be an hour, that is its natural slot and it is what I must, must continue to strive for.

Such a long time ago now, I had a meeting that was my first-ever annual review in a company. I’ve been freelance since the 1990s so, seriously, such a long time ago now. This one was the only annual review with at that firm — for reasons you’ll see — but it was followed by countless others and especially at the BBC where although I was usually freelance, things blurred a bit, and sometimes I’d be counted as staff.

Every single annual appraisal review I have ever had has been glowing, uplifting, just generally tremendous — except that very first one. And you know which one I remember.

More than remember it, it stuck with me. So much so that ahead of every one of those annual reviews afterwards and even now when anyone tells me they are about to have one, I get just a little sick with worry.

Because I strolled into that office all those years ago, sat down happily, knew I was doing well as a technical author writing computer manuals, knew I was really engaged and definitely on team, and even knew that I’d been entirely fair on the form I’d had to fill in about my abilities so far, what I wanted to next, all that stuff.

Unfortunately, my manager at the time had decided to grade people on a bell curve and had chosen me to be the worst-performing one. Hand on heart, I was and am convinced that he did this because I was so reasonable, I wasn’t going to complain. By God, I complained. A half-hour happy chat was instantaneously turned into an all-morning row where I fought over every single mark in every single category.

I’m trying to remember how many of us there were in this team, but I do recall one woman being unquestionably the best. And one man being unquestionably the worst. And there was another fella who I never quite got an impression of, at least not of his writing.

All three, and whoever else there was, got a promotion that day. I successfully argued up at least a lot of my grades on the form, but I knew even in the heat of the moment that the battle was over. I was just bloody-minded enough that I was going to make it a fight.

Of course, he was never going to do actual appraisals, he was always going to stick to this bell curve notion. So whatever I did, he won the war.

Except of course, he didn’t. Because from that instant, I was gone. I definitely began applying for other jobs, but even while I was still there, I was gone. All engagement cancelled. I nine-to-five’d it like I’d never done before and haven’t done since. I volunteered for nothing, suggested nothing, helped with nothing.

I can’t tell you why this is on my mind this week, I know I haven’t thought of it in a long time. But something triggered me and I had to tell you. Let me tell you something nicer though, something I’d actually forgotten until this all came tumbling out of me. At that firm, I was writing computer manuals and working with the developers. One group of developers made me man of the team one year — and I wasn’t even in their team.

If you possibly can, go work with people who appreciate you. Or at least don’t go work with people who won’t. Or go freelance and skip all of this stuff.

I wonder if I should give myself an annual appraisal now.