Ginnunga-gap

Posted by

Finally, I’ve got a name for it. Listen, last night I did my 120th speaking gig of the year and this one had something in common with maybe 10 of  the others. It’s not a good thing, not for me, but normally it only happens in what turn out to be the very best speaking gigs I do. That’s not the case now: last night’s wasn’t my very best. It was a Writers’ Guild event to do with supporting the Birmingham Writer in Residence job at the Birmingham Rep and the BBC. Guests were great, audience was perfect and I honestly don’t think anyone left that room feeling disappointed. Yet I wasn’t good enough. I’m thinking about this.

But quite shortly into it, I hit this thing I have today decided to call the Ginnunga-gap. I just make up syllables, really, and throw in a hyphen. if you don’t know the term – and I had to look it up despite knowing it for centuries – let me tell you in a moment. First, what I mean by it.

Whatever the subject you’re talking about, whatever the audience and whatever the format of the event, you have a certain time to fill and part of the job is filling that well. In these 10 or so cases, there has come a moment when I knew I couldn’t fill the time.

It’s usually about two thirds of the way through and we’ve all been working rather quickly, we’re through or nearly through all my material. The time from when it hits me to the end of the event can be as much as three hours. It is a calamitous, lurching fear that damages your stomach.

Officially, the Ginnunga-gap is a gaping abyss, a yawning void, it is the primordial void in Norse mythology. (Wikipedia spells it as one word, Ginnungagap.) That’s not where I know it from. It’s taken me a long time to remember where and actually to recall exactly the term. I knew it was Something Something Gap. It’s also taken me the last hour of searching through iBooks and Kindle when the book I know it from was right there on the shelf above my Mac. In direct line of sight, in fact.

The book is a collected quartet of novels by James Blish that together are known as Cities in Flight. It’s a remarkable series that uses this Ginnunga-gap term to describe the period between the end of this entire universe and the start of the next. I read it as a teenager, I think, and every many years I happen across it again and end up re-reading it. It’s the novel with my favourite technical term: the spindizzy. Love it. Just the word. I’m not fussed what it means.

I’m less keen on my Ginnunga-gap and while I do recommend the novels, I recommend your being better prepared than I sometimes am. I promise you that I’m prepared, sometimes far too much, and I admit that last night my thumb caused part of the problem. Instead of a nice OmniOutliner document with all my notes for the event, I looked down at my iPad and found I was reading the running order of a radio podcast I’d produced earlier in the week. “Well,” I said to the audience. “Any questions for the panel?”

My abilities and performance aside, last night I’d misjudged the amount of time we’d need for what we were doing and that was partly because I didn’t get exactly the audience I’d anticipated. Everyone who came was serious and there to find out things, but I’d mentally budgeted time for more people and the inevitable number of long-winded questions you get from a proportion of folk. Plus there are various issues around this topic that I’ve been asked about privately and would have to deal with but didn’t come up on the night. So I’m okay with that, that’s a natural development of an event in progress.

But this time I got the Ginnunga-gap about seven minutes into the 90.

Nine out of these last ten events with this stomach-tearing gap worked out brilliantly, in my opinion, and there is definitely something about working under pressure. Also about having a mental grab-bag of tools and topics plus a bucketful of anecdotes. None of that helped last night because my job was not really be there, to not be in the way, to not be the point of the event. Instead my job was to solder the panel and the audience together and make sure the former got to say what they needed and the latter got to hear what they must. I actually think I handled the questions well, choosing the next person, letting others know I’d seen them so they could put their hands down, then correctly going to those people, calling many out by name although most I hadn’t met before. All the usual stuff.

I’ve just realised that this particular usual stuff is when I’m working with the audience or I’m working with the panel. When I’m on my own – let me go from Norse mythology to Strictly Come Dancing – I’m out of hold. And there’s too much gapping.

Next gig: tomorrow.

 

Christmas Double Issue

Posted by

There is a pretty good chance that the words “Christmas double issue” mean something to you. Possibly they even mean a lot. If they do then you’re thinking of Radio Times for certain, maybe also TVTimes and if they don’t then you’re thinking eh?

RT Christmas cover

For the past 46 years, Radio Times magazine has produced a double issue of television and radio listings covering Christmas and New Year fortnight. Anything that lasts that many years, and looks set to continue forever, is going to build up a certain history but RT was at the heart of Christmas. It’s not unreasonable to say that Christmas wasn’t Christmas without Radio Times. I don’t think it is so special or important any more, I think the fondness we have for this issue is momentum from when it was usually the best and sometimes the only way to know what was on TV.

It’s the biggest-selling issue of the year by far and certain planning for it begins in January. That’s logistical planning to do with the print runs and the distribution. Editorial planning begins much later and I’ve completely forgotten when.

Even though I spent many years at Radio Times, chiefly on the website but also often writing for the magazine, I can’t remember when it all begins. I just remember that there is a stretch of weeks when you’re working on the regular weekly magazine plus the Christmas one. It’s known as pickup and I do not know why. Because you have to pick up the pace? I don’t know.

Pickup is exhausting and I’m thinking of all this now partly because the 2015 one should be out this weekend but also because there was a photo on Facebook of RT people working late into the night. I’d forgotten the exhaustion. Not that I ever truly experienced it to the extent the full time staff did.

But when I was writing their On This Day television history column, there was a point around late November when I would have to deliver five weeks’ worth in one go to meet all the various deadlines. That wasn’t easy.

Then – I can look back at this fondly because it was a long time ago but actually I was quite fond of it at the time – the Radio Times website used to have its own pickup period. Being online, the site’s pickup period used to begin the moment the magazine’s one finished. And for a couple of rather glorious years, I used to work on the magazine’s pickup and then immediately swap over the site’s one. Loved it.

I’d have to ask before I could tell you with any confidence when I left Radio Times but it has to be a lot of years ago now. And yet if you get the Christmas Double Issue and you look very, very hard, you will find my name and an entire 100 words I wrote.

I’ll take that. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me if I weren’t in the Double Issue.

Time and space

Posted by

Damn him, he was right. At midnight on my 21st birthday, this fella sat me down in front of him, crouched very close and told me that because he was doing this, I would always remember that moment, I would always remember him.

It felt a bit invasive, really, and I have some small pleasure in telling you that I remember the moment, I remember the room, the house, the woman next door I had a crush on, I remember everything except who in the hell he was. I can’t quite recall his face, can’t quite forget it either. So he’s in my head but as if with one foot in my noggin, one foot not.

I can’t decide if that’s better than my 30th of which I can’t remember a single thing. I’ve been pretty good ageing one year a time and in the right sequence but if you told me I’d skipped my 30th, I’d believe you.

My 40th is easy: I was in shock. Not because of the age, I’m not one of these people who get bothered by a number, but because of my wife Angela Gallagher. My teenage self would be startled that I was married, my sophisticated 40-year-old self was agog that she was still with me, but that wasn’t the shock. The true, honestly put-me-into-trauma-shock was that she surprised me with a trip to New York City. It’s my favourite place in the world and I did not see that coming.

Listen, I think you see where this is going and I think you see full well that actually I am one of those people who get bothered by a number. I wasn’t. But I am now. As I write this, I’m 49 and when you read it, I will be at least 50. Could be older if you’re a slow reader or if all that survives of the 21st century is this chat with you. But at least 50.

I have found it hard. I am finding it hard. I could do you a CV and it would sound okay. I can tell you that I am half the writer I wanted to be but, truly, I’ll take that – so long as this isn’t the end and my writing is still in progress.

It’s not even as if I simply feel old. I do, though. I was working with a school recently when an 8-year-old called me a ‘random unfamous guy with no dress sense’. I’ve also recently been described as a looking like an English teacher or ‘everybody’s favourite Geography teacher’. One guy thought I was a professor and didn’t mean it as an insult, I think he even fancied me. (Still got it, eh? I’m asking you seriously: I can’t tell. Can never tell.)

And none of these things are bad plus the fact that people have descriptions of me is profoundly flattering. Even the bad opinions, it means I am somehow in people’s heads. Briefly, no doubt, but there. Considering that I just assume that when I’ve left a room, I am gone from people’s minds, I am warmed by all this. Warmed by English or Geography, warmed by it all.

Only, they’re wrong. How can they be so wrong? I’m not a professor or a lecturer or an adult: I am 17 and I haven’t done anything yet.

That is a big, recurring thing with me that does not need a 50th birthday to be in my mind: the sense that I have only just started, that I have so much to do and, yes, not a giant amount of time left in which to do it.

So clearly I should get on with it, shouldn’t I? Except I wanted to tell you something. On my birthday I will be in Paris, my other favourite place in the world and while I get that these are not great times for the city, the time and the space means a lot to me.

And so does this. When I remember my 50th, it will be a memory of me crouching down to look you in the face and telling me that I will always remember talking to you right here.

Learning from rejection

Posted by

This isn’t about you or me, this isn’t about improving our writing because of rejections and it isn’t about taking deep breaths and getting over things. I don’t bother with the deep breaths and if I took time to get over things, I’d never get anything else done. Instead, this is about them: the people who do the rejecting and how they do it. For I got two rejections yesterday, which is ordinary and normal, but them coming within minutes of each other and being so very different stopped me short. I am disappointed about both of them and in each case they were things I actually wanted rather than being a freelancer just opening a discussion. You know how it is, I’m a freelancer so I’m in business, often enough times you pitch for something and it’s purely a financial choice. It’s for the cash, face it.

I always think you can tell when that’s the case: when a writer is doing something solely for the income and isn’t really interested, that comes through in the writing. This is one way where writing can be a bit arty-farty: if an accountant is doing a job they don’t care about, the numbers still look the same at the end. With a writer, the text is different. You can’t point to a particular word but you also can’t fail to see the tone.

In both these cases I was fully and entirely genuine, very much into both but the reason these rejections are sticking with me, the reason I want to talk to you about them today, is that I think I’ve been a bit stupid. I just said to you that you can’t miss the tone of a disinterested writer: I have always known that you can tell a lot about the person writing regardless of what they’re saying. I’ve also always known that I have no chance convincing you that I’m deeply charming and roguishly handsome even though I swear I’ve improved since we last met.

What was stupid of me was to not realise that this applies just as much to the writers of rejections. Usually a rejection comes in, you shrug or occasionally think “What was this one again?” and you move on. Sometimes it is a knife, I’m not saying it isn’t, but in the ordinary, normal everyday run of things there are lots of ordinary, normal everyday rejections.

One of these two was like that. I’m freelance but this one was for a six-month contract, it would’ve been a big deal and I honestly couldn’t decide about it in time so I applied figuring I’d think it through if they offered me the gig. Yesterday’s email from them said sorry, you haven’t got it, try us again next time. It was short but not terse, clear but not blunt. It was polite and it was professional. So am I: while I’m disappointed, I wouldn’t have looked at this rejection twice if it weren’t for the other one.

The other was about a short play. I rarely say this because I rarely think it but I adore this play of mine. It is joyous and I wrote it for two friends, I wrote it with them in mind, I pretty much wrote it at their insistence and I am inexpressibly grateful to them. Since the minute I wrote it and submitted it to a local festival they pressed me about, I have wanted to see it performed – and I’ve also wanted to do something more with it. Something bigger. I couldn’t while it was in contention for this festival so for the first time in ages it actually did annoy me that things got delayed. Give me a yes or give me a no, I’m fine either way.

I think the result was about four months late, I’m not sure. Might be less. And it was a no and I am fine with every part of that except that I do feel I’ve let these friends down. They got me to write a great script, they’re not even going to see it performed. I will. The delays mean I’ve lost a spot that I could’ve pitched it for in something else but it’ll be staged somewhere.

What fascinates me is that I read this rejection email and for the very first time ever, the subtext tells me I would’ve had a bad time if they’d said yes. The rejection email was Dickensian. Charles Dickens writing about a death in the family. Hand-wringing melodrama about the anguish the decision had caused them. The Royal Shakespeare Company would never be so crass but it was like the RSC rejecting a seven-year-old rather than just another festival saying nope, sorry, we don’t want it.

I can’t really tell you the name of the festival but you’ve never heard of it anyway. My friends say good things about it but I wouldn’t even know the name if they hadn’t told me. If I’d got in, I’d be very pleased but there is just no part of it that’s a big deal. I think I’m being unprofessional telling you this – I can’t help myself, you’ve got that face, I tell you everything – but what I learned from that rejection letter was that I’d have had a bad time working with these people.

Hey, maybe they just write a rubbish email. But speaking of that, just now, back up there where I was mentioning the six-month gig, I had an email. Forgive me, I broke off for a second to check it because it’s important and turns out to be relevant. Earlier today, I read a new draft of a piece I’m collaborating on and responded that I like this bit, don’t like that change, have removed this line, would like to add this other thing if we all agreed. The email I got back interrupting you and I said, broadly, yep, no, fine, yes and, bang, the article has been published.

Rejection is just part of the job and telling me a serialised drama about your rollercoaster of anguish and heartbreak rejecting me is insulting and patronising. When I work with you on a festival we are working together, we are working together to create something for an audience. When you try to stroke me like I’m a kitten with toothache, you have an insupportably high opinion of yourself and rudely low opinion of me.

I do not want to trivialise rejection, I’ve had the knives in the stomach, but those blades are rare and usually rejection is trivial. My friends are telling me to try again next time so excuse me, I need to go tell them no, I’m going to pass on that. I wonder how they’ll take it.

Bad things happen when you handwrite

Posted by

So I was using the new iPad Pro the other day and was handed the new Apple Pencil. I thought this was a sily name for a stylus but no, it’s the right name. Maybe because it was handed to me before I asked, maybe because my mind was on trying out the Smart Keyboard instead, I said thank you and scribbled something on the iPad’s screen. That’s nice. And then took a moment and a blink realise that it wasn’t paper and I wasn’t holding an actual pencil. This new device is that transparant, is that natural and normal. Immediately.

You know how parcel delivery firms get to sign your name on their touch screen devices and the entire world recognises that no one will ever recognise that scrawl as being yours or anyone else’s? I wrote my signature and it was my signature. It was terrible and awful and embarrassing, but it was precisely my signature.

It’s just that somehow this makes me want to confess to you something about the terrible and the awful handwriting. It makes me want to get something off my chest and maybe even atone for it. Maybe it’s doing that writing on the iPad Pro, maybe it’s the news of Terry Wogan having to miss Children in Need for the first time since the 1980s, but I minded today of my handwriting.

Specifically of my handwriting during Children in Need. I can’t remember the year now but the odds are that it was late 1980s or early 1990s and I got invited to work on Children in Need at BBC Pebble Mill. Can you imagine the thrill of being included at the heart of this in the MIdlands? I was giddy.

All I did was sit in Pebble Mill taking pledge calls. I can’t remember where in the building, I can’t picture any detail, except I can hear the voice of a caller saying she’d pledge £10 if someone would publish her book. There’s a thing with the BBC that everyone pays the licence fee so everyone pays for this service so you can’t be rude or even curt with anyone. But on Children in Need night, she was taking up time that another caller could’ve been using to give us their credit card numbers.

Or in theory they could. My other memory of that first night, apart from a great sense of becoming bone tired by the end of it, is of a producer taking me to one side. Oh, this is decades ago now and the agony of telling you this.

She patiently explained that if we can’t read the credit card numbers, we can’t get money from them. And she patiently explained getting money was the entire point of the charity night. You could bristle at her patiently explaining, you could resent being treated as an imbecile – but I couldn’t disagree that my handwriting was that bad and I deserved every syllable.

There you go. My handwriting cost the BBC some money. Let’s go further: my handwriting lowered the total, stopped Children in Need doing all it hoped. Let’s not go so far as to say that lives could’ve been saved if I my 9 was decipherable from my 7. Please.

I was asked back the next year but they kept me off the phones. Anyway. To donate to Children in Need without risking your credit card to me or any other scribbler, go online here.

Good things happen when you write

Posted by

I mean this: good and sometimes great things happen when you write. Equally, if you don’t write, then good things don’t happen. Only, I don’t mean that if you write a wonderful script then it gets filmed or a great book and it gets published. I’m finding that there isn’t necessarily even a tiny connection between what you’re writing and what happens.

Yet I have patches where I’m rubbish and I don’t take the time to write. These lead into spirals where I write even less. They’re also tied into when I do and don’t get up at 5am to work but all that early rising does is get me some time to write. Then when I write, whatever time it is, good things happen.

Yesterday, for instance, I was asked to collaborate on a book. The request didn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it did near as dammit. I wasn’t expecting it and it’s got nothing to do with what else I’m working on, but it’s a great idea, I want to work with the person who asked me, ultimately I just really, really want to read the book. So we should write it and I hope we will.

In this case, I think I can point to specific things: the woman who asked me knows I write books because I’ve told her and she knew I’d be interested in the subject because she’s known me for more than seven seconds. She’s also fully aware of my tea and chocolate problems. Plus she knows of a years-long project that died on me a few weeks ago so she even knew I had some availability.

I need to tell you those specific things because I need specific things. I loathe that I’m about to say to you that you have a certain energy when you write but, well, here goes: you have a certain energy when you write. I think it’s just the same way that, I believe, we are all at our most vibrant and attractive when we’re working: we’re making things happen, we’re performing really, and, yes, there is an energy.

So on days when I’ve been writing and then I meet people, I seem to get work. On days when I’ve chosen to sleep in and I’ve not got much done, I don’t.

It’s very easy to not write. It’s especially easy when you’re under pressures: I’ve had many times over the years where I’ve found it fantastically, overwhelmingly hard to write up a story idea when the mortgage is due. Yet every single thing I am doing now to keep the roof over my head began as something I wrote on the side while doing some other job. In every sense, my entire career is based on my writing.

I’m not going to make any grand claims for my career, not when I’ve so much to do and I am so far behind, but I can tell you that it is the career I wanted and that I worked for. And I can tell you that writing this to you today is why I’m confident that I will bound into a workshop I’m running all day. I’ll bound in, I’ll cause a ruckus and I’ll bound out.

Stop listening to me and go write something, okay?

In and on and about Radio Times

Posted by

Last week I had a lifetime ambition fulfilled when drama I wrote was aired on BBC Radio. What I didn’t realise when I told you this was that there was a second ambition fulfilled – and that it throws me back to an ambition I had in the 1990s.

Specifically this. I can picture myself walking down a street reading the latest issue of Radio Times which had The Simpsons on the cover and a feature on the inside about the new RT website. I was deeply, gratingly self-kickingly disappointed: given what I knew and what I was doing, that was the website I should’ve been working on and I’d missed it. That was 1996 and as it happens, the website missed its launch date by a week. The things you remember, eh?

Within a year, I think, certainly not much more than that, I was working on that website. That meant working with the website team but also with the magazine: I can very clearly picture the first editorial meeting I sat in. It was in a boardroom that no longer exists – wait, I worked in BBC Pebble Mill and they knocked it down, I worked in BBC Television Centre and they knocked it down. This was BBC Woodlands and it was demolished years ago.

I’m not going to think about that. Woodlands was the one that deserved to be demolished. Leave it at that. But before the wrecking balls came, there were these regular meetings in a board room that had glass cabinets holding all of Radio Times. All of it. Bound copies going back to 1923. It was a marvellous little meeting room. Not an exciting one really, have a look for yourself.

boardroom at RT

I have no idea whose water bottle that is. Looks far too healthy to be mine. And the room looks small and dark. But then it was. Nothing special, except for that collection which extends past the camera to maybe six or seven cases, and for the people who’d meet in there. I thought I knew my television drama but, whoa, I had no candles to hold next to this lot.

As part of the work I did get to write bits that went in the magazine, the odd line, I can’t even remember what but nothing that earned me a byline. Until the issue of 25 September – 1 October 1999. I’d written a short piece about websites or something and I can remember sitting on a coach in Victoria Station when I got the call. My then website editor Rebecca phoned to tell me I was getting a byline. She knew how important this was to me.

Still is. I can tell you that date because I have the issue still, sixteen years later. I just turned around at my desk and took it off the shelf to check. That was the first time my name was in Radio Times and it wasn’t the last. Far from it. My most recent was about two weeks ago, I think, so all these years on I still get in there. I’ve been trying to work it out and I can account for at least a thousand bylines over those years.

Lots of things I’m proud to have written, many things that were just ordinary, pedestrian, required-but-not-special, and a few things I’d like to rewrite now.

I just have to say that I’ve got a bit used to having bylines in this magazine, I am used to seeing my name there. Until last week.

Last week it was an enormous, enormous jolt seeing my name. Because for the first time, my name wasn’t next to a Radio Times article I’d written, it was in the description of a programme in the magazine’s listings pages. Doctor Who: Doing Time got a little paragraph in the radio pages and there I am.

Here I am.

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 10.03.55

I didn’t expect that. As comprehensive as Radio Times is – show me any other magazine that covers all these channels in such detail, especially the radio ones – my Doctor Who was airing on a digital-only station. I didn’t think about it but if I had done, I’d have reckoned the listing would read “18:00 Doctor Who” and that would be that. Instead, I got that full paragraph.

Alan Plater once said in an interview that it was a big moment getting his name in Radio Times. He said it was a big psychological moment for all writers, it meant something. All these years later, and in a rather smaller way than Alan ever did, I got listed in RT for my drama and yes. It means something big to me.

So does this. The magazine is of course very pressed for space but they chose to give room for this listing and they chose to because it was me. I emailed to say how gigantic a moment this was for me and they wrote back saying they’d been thrilled I had a radio drama on. Laurence Joyce, David Oppedisano and Jane Anderson. They told me this and I put my hand to my chest. So touched.

Just a lifetime ambition fulfilled, that’s all

Posted by

I’m a scriptwriter, I’m a radio man and I am a drama nut. The grail for me is writing drama for BBC Radio and I have been trying to do this for a very long time. You can’t believe how close I’ve come and I can well believe how far I’ve come in my writing through every single attempt.

And now as I write this to you, it’s happening tomorrow.

 

Doctor Who Doing Time on BBC iPlayer 2015

William Gallagher’s Doctor Who: Doing Time on BBC Radio 4 Extra

Doctor Who: Doing Time on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Saturday 24 October 2015 at 18:00 and then again at midnight.

Forget for a moment how much this means to me, I am tickled red that it is all a very Doctor Who timey-wimey kind of thing. For the piece that will be broadcast for the first time tomorrow was made five years ago. It is now the very first drama I have on BBC Radio and back then it was the very first audio drama I’d done. Doctor Who: Doing Time is a Big Finish production and I went from this one to a series of two-hour long audio stories that have become my favourite writing job.

Big Finish makes Doctor Who under licence from the BBC and though the stories are made for CD and download, they often then go on to BBC Radio 4 Extra. This is just the first time it’s happened with one of mine.

Five years ago the download version of Doing Time was released very late one night. Angela and I listened to it here with the lights off and the sound pouring into my soul. Tomorrow I’ll be tuning in to BBC Radio 4 Extra at 18:00 and quite possibly again at midnight for the repeat. My first-ever BBC Radio repeat.

Back to school

Posted by

I left school certain that I would never go back and not at all certain that I could ever be a writer. It took a lot of work to pull off writing and while I was concentrating on that, I accidentally went back to many, many schools. From last weekend to the start of next week alone, I’ll have spent three full days in schools as a visiting author and I ran one short workshop for school-age writers.

I’ve also done one workshop for adult writers which doesn’t sound relevant except one of the attendees was a teacher from my old school. In the Venn diagram of things I remember about my school and teachers I liked, she’s in the tiny smidgeon of an overlap. She walked in that door and the only thing faster than her asking if I were the William Gallagher she taught was me asking her if she’d been my chemistry teacher.

I didn’t like my school but she and I had a great natter after the workshop and I’m astonished how much she got me to remember. Good and bad: I told her of the teacher who, heading for a nervous breakdown which he later succeeded at, had worked hard to get me expelled for no reason. That sounds bad and it was but the fight to keep me in there later proved useful in the politics you get in journalism.

I told her of the other chemistry teacher we had who’d spent a lesson having us mark the homework of the previous group. I know I was irritated, I wish I had been older and objected, Mind you, I really wish I’d just turned to the back of the exercise book and given this pupil a 10/10 well done, see me. Just to find out what happened.

There’s no 10/10 anymore. I don’t know how marking is done and from what I gather, I am unlikely to comprehend how teachers are supposed to mark or really do anything. The sobering and distressing part of going into schools is seeing this sliver of how controlled and inflexible things are forced to be.

But the good thing is that I can go in to them, cause a right ruckus and then get out. Usually get out and go right back to writing. I don’t usually do this many schools so close together, I’m a writer who does the odd school visit. I could never be clever enough to be a teacher nor have the resilience they do to go in again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

These three school visits all came via a company I’m just getting to know called Authors Abroad. But I can trace the lot back further to one conversation with Jonathan Davidson of Writing West Midlands, the company currently running the Birmingham Literature Festival as well as around 300 events for young writers – three hundred, every year.

I’d just moved back to Birmingham, I don’t know how I’d found Writing West Midlands. But I met Jonathan for a coffee. This is three years ago and I can tell you every detail of the conversation including the moment when he mused over whether I might be good in schools and I pretended that would be great, every single ferociously bad memory of mine coming back into my head and flooding down to make my stomach twinge too.

I can tell you every detail and I can picture every inch but I can never go back to the same place because we met at New Street Station. I was there yesterday, coming back from a Manchester school, and I tried figuring out where the coffee place had been. New Street is transformed and, okay, maybe I am too.

But those Manchester kids. There’s at least one who I’m sure will become a writer, who I think actually already is. And there’s another who told me that this had been the best day they’d ever had there. I melted them, I’m still melted now.

A theme is emerging here

Posted by

I thought it was just me – I often think it’s just me, usually I’m right – but last week’s musing on the unappreciated art form that is the television title sequence
showed me I was wrong. It’s far from unappreciated. Over Twitter, Facebook and email I had people wanting to tell you and me about great sequences.

Curiously, some of them were rubbish. They were poor as pieces of filmmaking, they were narrated and in such a expository way that they plodded. This is only some of them, you understand, but those ones also had theme tunes that were so desperately dated that they could now be parodies. Or worse. They could be lift muzak.

Only, that’s a big thing. The theme tune. I was thinking of the entire sequence, visuals, music, the lot, but there are themes that have gone on to have lives outside their shows. Sometimes they’re borrowed by other series years later, quite often they get released on record, just once or twice they become hits. Big enough hits that they got on Top of the Pops.

Okay, I think that only happened once. But it was funny seeing TOTP throwing up its arms and having no idea how to include a track that had no performers who could or would come to the studio. I seem to remember watching the studio audience dancing for the whole three minutes instead. That was enough to put you off this and nothing should put you off this:

How many times can that C-Plus store, corner of People’s Drive, get robbed anyway? Mike Post and Pete Carpenter wrote the theme to Hill Street Blues and surely it was key to that show’s success. It set the tone for a police show that was complex, that didn’t have happy endings, that often didn’t have endings at all. That often had the bad guys getting away with it.

I’m fascinated by how you set the tone for a piece and I am also, separately, fascinated by editing. The theme to Cheers occupies both halves of my fascination. As aired, this is a surprisingly sad tune to open a sitcom.

Yet the full version is funny. Somehow the full one is exactly as sad as the aired, yet it also contains jokes that are clever and natural.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name was written by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo, and sung by Portnoy. Cheers still stands up, by the way: its spin-off Frasier gets a lot of praise for its utterly perfect pilot but the opener to Cheers is also an exquisite example of screenwriting.

I don’t think you can say the same about this show, but you know the theme and it was another hit.

Eye Level by Jack Trombey (real name Jan Stoeckart) and arranged by Simon Park to be performed by his orchestra was famously the theme to Van Der Valk – but what’s less well known is that it wasn’t written for the show. It was written to be stock or library music. There’s another very famous theme that wasn’t written to be a theme too.

This was written for the TV show it eventually became the theme for but it was just one of many pieces Lalo Schifrin wrote to be used over and over again on the soundtrack to episodes of Mission: Impossible.

It’s that theme music that is the reason we now have five Mission: Impossible feature films with a better arrangement of the theme: star and producer Tom Cruise says that’s what got him interested. On such small things do franchises turn.

Hawaii Five-O, as if you needed telling. I don’t follow the new Hawaii Five-O but actually I think it’s done the theme better. It’s just done it shorter. Still, I remember an interview with the producers where they said that whenever they told anyone they were planning a Hawaii Five-O reboot, people would think for a moment and say “Don’t screw up the theme”.

The original show ran from 1968 to 1980 and when it was cancelled, there were all these film crews and production facilities in Hawaii with nothing to do. That’s the key reason that a certain other show was set there: not only did it use the same facilities, not only did the show itself make regular reference to Five-O, but it became a hit and its theme is great.

That’s not the show’s original theme. Magnum, PI is worth a watch again because its stories still work – chiefly because creator Don Bellisario had a rule that in any episode as much action as possible should happen wherever Thomas Magnum wasn’t. So he’d always get a flat tyre on the way to something important. I suppose it was cheaper but it also kept the focus on the character and so he grew to become much more interesting than a standard detective. It’s like the way that Columbo villains are fascinating characters because they have to be: it’s one baddie versus Columbo for 90 minutes so we’d better be riveted by them.

There was also a kind of rule that every other episode would strongly feature Vietnam: then still a controversial topic that most TV shows avoided. (Though I think the first drama to really address it was Lou Grant: there’s a season 2 episode called Vet that is superb. Writer Leon Tokatyan won the Writers’ Guild of America’s best writing award for it.)

If you do go watch Magnum, PI again, though, brace yourself for a disappointment for about two-thirds of the first season: it has a different and far, far, far less memorable theme. Both the dud and the hit were written by Mike Post and I’ve just remembered he also did this:

The Rockford Files. Sorry about the quality on the start of that. It’s surprisingly hard to find a good, clean cut of the theme, though you could come round here and watch my DVDs. My favourite of all those opening Rockford Files answering machine messages, by the way, goes “This is the message phone company. I see you’re using our unit, now how about paying for it?”

Hang on. That’s seven themes so far and six of them are American. Maybe America just does themes better – though there’s an irony there as it’s America that led the way against having title sequences at all. How’s this for a British series whose theme is far more famous than its own episodes?

That’s The Protectors and – what, sorry, you’re wondering where the lyrics are? Here you go.

Tony Christie singing Avenues and Alleyways. He’s still singing it today yet the series only lasted two seasons in 1972 and 1973. It’s going to be in my head all day now.