Twenty minutes

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I’ve been reading around 70 Doctor Who scripts in the last week or two, and there’s a particular line that I think sums up that show — and every drama. On page 45 of “The Eleventh Hour” by Steven Moffat, the Doctor (Matt Smith) and Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) have this exchange at a crucial moment:

THE DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor. I’m a time traveller. Everything I told you twelve years ago is true. I’m real. What’s happening in the sky is real! And if you don’t let me go right now everything you’ve ever known is over.

Amy staring at him: frowning, struggling with this.

AMY: … I don’t believe you.

THE DOCTOR: Twenty minutes. Just believe me for twenty minutes.

It’s a simple and great line, a simple and tremendous request made to us far more than to Amy, and it is said with quite incredible conviction by Smith. The situation is absurd, the situation would be absurd in real life and actually equally so in any other drama. But in this show, at this time, in this way, you believe.

I think that’s absolutely remarkable and while Doctor Who is a very variable series, I think it has a torrent, a break-neck rushing tsunami of imagination piled up on top of imagination. At its regular best, it reminds me of the Barbie movie and that film’s sense of reaching out its hand to us and inviting you and me to come along for a storm of a ride.

I’m working on writing that well.

Driving home a point

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If there were ever a time when I had a chance of being profound, I would have expected it to be this week. For in the past seven days, I have spent some ten hours driving, clocking up hundreds of miles, from early morning to actually rather early the next mornings, with all that opportunity for thought and reflection.

Didn’t come up with a single thing.

Not one sausage.

But I would like to tell you about something I did up with this week when I was out of the car, when there was no time for thinking, no time for reflection, and when I just had to get on with it. You look like you’re the same as me: hours of thinking might not get us anywhere concrete, but two minutes’ notice will.

I also have a feeling that you and I are both thinking of the phrase that necessity is the mother of invention, but unfortunately we’re writers so we’re not allowed to use cliches or overly familiar phrases. Not so much.

So anyway, one of the places I drove to was a school where I was to be a visiting author and run some workshops. I don’t do this regularly, but I do it quite often and, very broadly, the whole day could be a show. It’s not as if I’ve scripted it, but then equally I would never waste someone’s time by going in without a plan. Plus, over time, you do learn which ideas tend to work. You get to know which jokes and even what apparent ad libs or seemingly unconscious pauses, will typically get a laugh.

I tell you, having forty kids and half a dozen adults laughing at you is fantastic.

But even going in armed with a plan, my hope is really to change that plan as we go. As I find out what the group is good at and get a sense of what they like, I change the day and they unknowingly shape the afternoon session. This time, though, there were two problems, starting with how the day needed to be about 45 minutes shorter than I typically spend.

And the other is that somehow we ended up with the kids voting to write horror stories. I like their faces and their shouts when I pretend to mishear and say okay, I’m very surprised, but fine, you voted for it, we’re writing romance stories.

Horror is a worry, though, because it can mean pretty gruesome stories. Actually, horror stories are a horror story.

So for this session, I needed to find a way to steer the young writers down other, less bloody, routes, and also to please do it faster.

I did directly tell them that I didn’t want blood and gore. I did say that it’s much better when you can do something scary, or spooky, or ghostly. Uh-huh, said 36 children. Yeah, sure, said about 6 adults.

But they said that right as the lunch bell went. And toward the end of the lunch, they all went outside to the playground.

I’m sitting there in this big hall, juggling schedules in my head, thinking of how to write horror, thinking of what elements of the original afternoon plan were still relevant, and which just are no longer workable at all. Through a large and wide window, I watched the kids and their teachers and teaching assistants. At a distance, it didn’t look as if the adults were so very much older than the children, and the children didn’t look so much younger.

And then I think before I quite realised what I was doing, I was running around the hall, going to every single piece of paper they had been working on, and at the end of each sheet, writing the words “It’s coming.”

Then I also typed that in large, red letters on my iPad and made sure that I left it across the room, in full view but also clearly away from me. I couldn’t have written those words, I was all the way over here.

I tell you, the buzz in that room as the kids came back in and some saw the iPad screen, some found the writing on their papers, was wonderful. I thought it would take longer for them to notice and I definitely was not going to say a word even if they never saw a thing, but instead it was instant, the moment they were all back. They all saw it and to my utter joy, some started accusing others of having written it.

But when it came to their stories later, all of them were scary and none of them were gory.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had a sillier name, I suspect I’ve not often had such little time to put a silly idea into action, but I also haven’t had such a roaring rush of delighted, joyous reactions.

Since it’s you, I’ll admit that partway through the afternoon, I changed the message on the iPad. Everybody saw it, nobody was that fussed.

I changed it to say “It’s gone.”

March of time

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So there’s this thing I do now where at points, I cannot do anything — not work, read, anything — and instead just have to sit there watching the minutes tick by. Then there’s this totally separate thing – wait, I can tell you this one: on Thursdays I produce the AppleInsider podcast. That means I have a conversation for about an hour, and then immediately hear that whole hour’s conversation all over again.

Usually at twice normal speed.

And then there is this. It’s March. We’re two complete monthsS into 2024 and I don’t feel as if I’ve started the year yet, plus I definitely haven’t finished enough, and yet time is zooming by –

Hang on, there’s another one. Maybe two weeks ago now, I was interviewed for BBC CWR about a thing. Just a fun couple of minutes, but unusually for me, it was a pre-record and I don’t know when the segment plays out. Since I appear to have an ego the size of something someone cleverer than me would’ve said now, I would like to hear it. Consequently every few days, I zoom through the BBC iPlayer recordings of the show and am prepared to be whisked back to when I recorded it. So far I never am, I haven’t heard myself, but I have had chance to hear a lot of great music. Also a really interesting thing about needles.

I cannot finish the novel I’m writing. There. I’ve said it.

To date I have thrown away at least 80,000 words of it, sometimes because they are crap and it’s about time I was writing better, but otherwise because it’s so clearly constantly on my mind that I should be better at writing about time. You know how it is when a character does something in chapter 7 that changes what they did in chapter 1 and you think that’s fine, until you realise it makes a pigs’ ear of chapters 10 through 31. That’s the thing.

I need to stop thinking about time and instead think about time. There. Thanks: it helped talking to you about this. And I believe our 50-minute hour is up already.

Repositioning

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I think about this a lot, but let me think about it quickly. A long time ago now, I was at Radio Times, reading a book in a break and when I looked up from the page, everything changed. I was at Radio Times, where I had so wanted to be, but now, one page later, one paragraph later, I was at Radio Times and for all I liked it there, it was no longer where I wanted to be.

The book was The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook — a Radio Times writer at the time, as it happens — and the paragraph was a mention of some casting decision in Doctor Who. The punch for me was that I had written a news story for RT about that casting decision but from the dates in the book, I knew that I’d done this more or less exactly one year after the choice had been made. I no longer wanted to be writing about other people’s writing, I needed to be at the point when those decisions are made.

All of which is on my mind because it is so very often on my mind, but particularly today because it’s just happened again. And again it was because of Doctor Who.

Follow. You will know that there was a very good Christmas Special this year and that it was the first story for the 15th Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa. After it aired, there was a flurry of fan activity over one character who had two lines of dialogue, but made infinitely more observant viewers than me catch their breath. This character was played by Susan Twist who was also featured in “Wild Blue Yonder”, two episodes before. She played a seemingly different character, Mrs Merridew, and was certainly in a different time.

As I say, smarter people than I spotted this and, whumph, conspiracy theories ignited. This wasn’t chance casting, this was A Clue about future stories in the show. Amusingly, for me, you can read all about it in this article — on Radio Times.

But now.

Some 225 Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related scripts have been released online and one of them is for that Christmas Special, “The Church on Ruby Road”. Which was previously, as you learn from the script, going to be called “The Bridge”. Anyway, there it is, scene 3, page 6:

A WOMAN in the CROWD – a woman we’ve seen as Mrs Merridew in Special 2, a woman we’ll see a lot more of – YELLS:

I’d like to be as observant as viewers who spotted this, but I need to be writing, creating, making.

I need to write betterer.

Liberator

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It tickles me that not only am I obsessed with time, but I know that I was 8 years, 1 month and 11 days old when I first became so. It helps that I know that a drama prompted me and now there is an online archive of BBC television listings to show me when it was on. And once I had looked up the first airdate of Tom’s Midnight Garden in 1974, there was also Wolfram Alpha to tell me how many days I’d been alive then.

What neither source can tell you is that this January 1974 version of Philippa Pearce’s wonderful novel was peculiar. Dramatised by John Tully, it appears that the BBC took his scripts from his 1969 version, edited them a bit, and filmed them all over again. There are now many dramatisations of this story and I think the received wisdom from those who care is that this 1974 one that besotted me is the poorest. It isn’t. The 1999 film version is simply bizarrely poor. My one was just cheap.

Anyway.

I know you want to go look up something. A long time ago I found a complete collection of Radio Times issues in the BBC Pebble Mill library and while I can’t even remember where that library can have been now, I do remember people wanting to see it and wanting to look up what was on TV when they were born. I can only remember showing one person, but there must’ve been others.

Now I look back at that and while I can see the very shelves the bound copies were on, what I really see is how peculiar it feels to know that I would go on to write for Radio Times.

None of that was in my mind when you and I started talking now. I had nothing in my head about RT and how those back issues would become like familiar old friends later when I spent some years writing the magazine’s On This Day television history column. But I was thinking about this business of knowing or at least being able to find out a particular moment in my life.

Specifically, 19:40 GMT on Monday, January 16, 1978, when I was 12 years, 1 month and 20 days old. The third episode of Blake’s 7 started twenty minutes before and this was the moment when the world, or at least that part of the UK not watching Coronation Street, saw the starship Liberator’s teleport special effect for the first time. If you know the show, you know the effect: when Roj Blake beams down, the edge of the TV frame has a white Quantel-style line which becomes a shrinking circle that ends up forming the outline of the character. When he teleports back up, a white outline forms around him, he fades to nothing, and the outline balloons out to the edge of the screen before vanishing.

It is seriously, seriously cheap. And yet I wanted to be able to do that. I even managed to get a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet which is still on my desk today.

Only a little while later, incidentally, I would also want a house that was as full of bookshelves as Alan Plater and Shirley Rubinstein’s was, and I eventually got exactly that. Presumably one book at a time.

And this week I was minded of how I also got to teleport. Ish. Enough.

For this week marks the 200th edition of 58keys, a YouTube series I do for writers who use Macs, iPhones and iPads. To celebrate 200 episodes or four years of new episodes every Wednesday without fail, I made a collection of the silliest bits. So not the best, I think, and not the worst, I hope, but the daftest.

And at 5 minutes and 29 seconds into the video there is the last bit in my first-ever clip show, which sees me teleporting out of my office in precisely the way I had wanted to all those years before.

If you want something badly enough, and if you wait more years than I dare ask Wolfram Alpha about, you can get it.

I find that a freeing kind of thought. Liberating, in fact.

Atmospheric disturbance

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At the end of Before Sunset – I don’t believe I’m giving anything away – there are shots of all the locations we’ve seen during the film. Except we saw them at night, we saw them with people, and now they’re empty and it’s morning daylight. I don’t know why, but I gasped at that. Maybe it was like seeing the empty canvas. It was definitely like coming home after a long time away so that everything was the same and everything was different.

And I felt the same thing earlier this week when I made a short appearance on BBC Breakfast. I’ve been to that show before — I was on it ten years ago so clearly I’m now a regular — and while the studio has changed in that time, the building hasn’t. I don’t know BBC Salford remotely well enough to recognise it all or even find my way around, but I remembered little details and most of all I recognised the feel of the place.

Only, I recognised the BBC’s Salford studios from all the other BBC buildings I’ve been in. Television Centre, Pebble Mill, Bush House, Broadcasting House, White City, Woodlands, East Tower, Threshold House, Centre House, BBC Cardiff, BBC New York, I recognised them all there. With the exception of BBC Cardiff which so clearly must have been designed by the same architect who did Pebble Mill that I stumbled at the doorway, I was that overcome with nostalgia, I know the recognition is not specific to a building type. It’s specific to what is being done there.

To say I was a cog on BBC Breakfast last Tuesday is overstating it, but even the bits on the end of cogs move and they move against other cogs, and for a delicious short time I felt part of a BBC News show again. The job is to be there when needed, do what you’re there for and then get out of the way, but even that felt good and right.

I don’t think I saw more than a dozen people in the hour or so I was there, but they were a dozen people all working to the same aim. There is something special about a studio, something special about a show, definitely something special about the BBC.

Just before BBC Woodlands was demolished, I walked around the whole building very early one day, taking photographs of what was then such a familiar place and now is only a bit of a memory. If I can find those shots, I might take a wander around them again, looking at the empty canvas in the morning light.

Framing memories

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Forty years ago in 1984, the film Streets of Fire played for three nights at the art cinema closest to my college, and I went every night.

The truth is that this was because the music is fantastic — Jim Steinman wrote some, Jimmy Iovine produced some, Stevie Nicks was involved, so was Tom Petty, Ry Cooder, the list goes on. And to this day I will listen to the soundtrack.

The real truth is that I was a bit bored.

And okay, okay, get off my back, the true truth is that I have no clue why I did this. I mean, there are plenty of films that I’ve seen many times and not just on streaming, I went back to the cinema to see Arrival two more times after my first, and I’d go again tonight if it were being screened anywhere.

But that was because I adore Arrival, and I am pretty sure that in 1984 I decided to see all three nights of Streets of Fire before I’d even seen any of it.

And I did learn something.

I learned how important an audience really is.

Up to that point, I’d seen myself and other audiences as passive receivers of shows. When a comic stops at the end of a session to say thank you, thank you, you were a wonderful audience, I used to think that was such bollocks. Now I think it’s probably bollocks most of the time, but there are nights when it’s true and the when audience makes an enormous difference.

Such as with Streets of Fire at the Derby cinema, I want to call that cinema the Metro but it’s a long time ago, I’m not sure. Something like that. I remember seeing This is Spinal Tap there, if that helps, and there was a day-long screening once of all six episodes of Edge of Darkness, with writer Troy Kennedy Martin attending, and with me choosing to go instead of revising for exams. Thinking about it all these years later, I still feel the guilt I did when there was a computer in the show that was exactly the type I was supposed to be working on, but then all these years later I think I learned more from Edge of Darkness than I ever did from my studies.

Anyway.

It is so long ago now that I can’t remember all three nights of Streets of Fire, but I have pretty clear recall of what must have been the first and the last. For the first one, I enjoyed the film and had a huge crush on Deborah Van Valkenburgh who at the time was at the impossibly old age of 32.

Anyway.

The second night is a mystery but the third is clear because it was strikingly different. Obviously the film was the same, but the audience was not. Possibly this was a Friday, possibly the audience was a little drunker, but what they definitely were was derisory. They hooted at the film, they mocked bits I hadn’t even particular registered, and although they had a good time, it was very certainly at the expense of the movie. They were laughing at it, never with it.

Flash forward four decades.

I just watched it again.

The dialogue is poor. The structure is very clear and overtly obvious, yet also odd in how long it takes key things to happen. There’s a sudden scene change where we’re supposed to jump in fright and instead you just think you’ve leant on the skip button for a sec.

But the music is still great. Every frame is a work of art, an utterly gorgeous piece of cinematography. Mind you, I say that as someone who likes industrial art, grungy disused factories lit with neon lights reflected in oil slick puddles. Mind you, maybe I got into that here. Mind you, maybe I’m regretting telling you this.

There are fans who adore this film, there are critics who loathe it. I am now taken by how it tried to be set in some alternative version of the 1950s and now looks firmly 1980s.

But if I can’t recommend it, if I found my mind wandering this time until the next bit of music starts, there is just one terrible thing. One truly terrible and unforgivable thing.

It’s that Deborah Van Valkenburgh is now too young for me.

You wouldn’t credit it

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I’m not 100% convinced that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences knows how films are made. Yes, I am thinking of how Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie have not been nominated in their main categories. (Gerwig was shut out of Best Director and Robbie out of Best Actress, but the “Barbie” film they created – Gerwig co-wrote it and Robbie created the project — are nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.)

Oddly, that bit about Best Adapted versus Best Original Screenplay gets questioned a lot and it’s one of the few really clear rules. If it’s based on any existing property, it’s adapted. So admittedly it’s unusual that the source material for “Barbie” is a doll instead of a book or play, but there’s no question that it’s in the correct screenwriting category. Even if it is easily the most original script I’ve read in such a long time.

I’ve worked on awards and I know there’s no such thing as a lock, a given, not when countless people are voting. But if something is a candidate for Best Picture there is something wrong when the director isn’t in contention for Best Director. I’m not sure that it’s the same for best actor or actress, but I do think that Margot Robbie was extraordinary as Barbie.

Where I am sure is over the writing categories. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach deserve their Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. They won’t win: they’re up against Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, for which I can only presume he’s made the dialogue audible this time.

My longer-standing problem and where I question the Academy’s concept of filmmaking, is in the history of the Oscars. To date, there have been 95 ceremonies and so 95 Best Picture winners. (It is confusing: there were two winners in the very first Oscars, covering 1927-1928, in slightly differently-named awards. Somehow it still adds up to 95 even though this year’s Oscars are the 96th.)

Assuming I haven’t cocked up the spreadsheet, out of 95 Best Picture winners, only 16 also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and another 16 won for Best Adapted. That means only 32.68% of what the Academy says are the greatest movies ever made, also won any award for their writers.

That’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saying that it doesn’t matter what the story is, doesn’t matter what any character says, really doesn’t matter about the characters at all, a film can still be the best without any of those.

I can just about see how Best Production Design or Best Makeup and Hairstyling could be done without the script, except no, I can’t: as talented as any film department is, they have to start with the script. The script says it’s set in a desert, the script says there are three women, two men, and a kid, and describes them.

It’s not all there on the page, I am not in any way trying to reduce anyone else’s contribution to a film, but none of it is there at all without the script. None of it.

So the Oscars thinking the script doesn’t matter two thirds of the time, yes, it makes me question how they think films are made.

But then at least the Oscars have always recognised that films are written. The British Academy of Film and Television Awards didn’t notice writers for the first 19 years of the BAFTAs. I’m not joking.

Action romcoms

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It depends on the school I’m being a visiting author at, and it depends very much on the pupils, but when I’ve got a whole day with the same group, I like to have them change what we’re going to do in the afternoon. I’ve always got a plan, I wouldn’t waste their time turning up without one, but by around the end of the morning, they’re hopefully into it and I definitely have a sense of what they can do.

So while I’ll keep some of the same skeleton structure of the afternoon, I run an exercise that results in them having named broad genres like horror, comedy, romance, thriller, fantasy, you get the idea.

The last couple of times I’ve done this, we’ve then had a vote on which of these we will use for the afternoon and it is shocking to me how often they go for horror. That’s actually quite a tricky one because I’ve had some gruesome tales come out of these writers. But I also get to amuse myself by getting them to vote by raising their hand. I’ll count the two who vote for romance, then I’ll count the overwhelming majority who’ve voted for horror, and I will pretend it’s really close. Or I’ll express surprise because I thought they were going to choose horror and yet here they are, every single pupil mad-keen to write romance.

“Well, if you’re sure you want to write romance…” I say, to roars of laughter. It’s really a treat to be laughed at sometimes.

Anyway, we seem to always end up writing horror.

But as we go around the votes, I have sometimes told them honestly that my favourites are romance and thrillers — and that I don’t really distinguish between them. I don’t go into detail, nobody there is interested in what I like to write, but if I were to ponder aloud, I’d would be thinking something like this. You’re not likely to die in a romcom, but in real life you can want the ground to open up and chew on you if she or he says no.

In a thriller, everything changes, everything turns, on the moment you are or are not caught. In a romance, everything changes, everything turns, on the moment you ask the question. In that moment, you are wide-open vulnerable, the real you is exposed and there is no circumstance in which everything will ever be the same again. Good or bad, what you had before is over.

I find that electrifying and I have believed entirely that this is why I am arrested by romances and romcoms.

Only…

Last Wednesday night, I watched “Met Someone”, an episode of the 1990s US romance sitcom “Mad About You”, written by Danny Jacobson. There was tension, but this was a flashback episode to where two characters met, two characters who we’ve already been following as a married couple for ten episodes. I imagine if it were the first episode you saw, things would be different, but after ten weeks with this couple, it is impossible to doubt the outcome when they meet.

And yet you do.

You find yourself rooting for the two to get together, fully aware that yes, of course they do. In a 22-minute running time, complete with such jokes that I remember them 30 years after first seeing this episode, Jacobson writes what I think is a perfect romance. The speed of it, somehow you know it is all hyper-fast but it doesn’t feel like it. I just had to go check the running time to be sure, it uses its time so exquisitely well.

You can see the importance of this moment for these characters, you can see every beat on their faces. What you can’t do, though, is see the episode. To my knowledge, it’s not streaming anywhere, or at least not in the UK, and I got to see it only because I have the DVDs.

I don’t have a DVD player anymore, or not one I can find, but I long ago ripped my DVDs onto my Mac and use Plex to stream the video from there to my living room TV.

Which you might argue is too much detail, is something you don’t need to know, but at least you can get Plex, I’m not being entirely useless. Not entirely, no.

You can call me AI, but I’d rather you didn’t.

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I don’t know how long we’re going to have to suffer through the hype years of AI, but we’re definitely there now and I can only wish that it will be over soon. I use AI apps for transcription of interviews and videos and audios, it’s fantastic how much better all of that is now that I don’t have to be the one manually winding back a tape a syllable or two at a time. And ultimately, that’s where we’re heading because that’s where we’ve already been: AI was the word of 2023, but AI was already behind at least many years of technology development that we already enjoy.

So when your iPhone suggests the correct spelling of Beiderbecke, or remembers that when you email me you usually also email these two other people so it offers you their names, that’s AI. When your iPhone offers you news headlines in the morning, it’s because it’s spotted that you regularly look up news headlines in the morning.

You didn’t once think it was AI, nor even Machine Learning as Apple has been calling it since at least 2016, you just accepted the suggested names if they were right and ignored them if they were wrong.

Android or iPhone, these devices have been using AI or machine learning for ages and it’s all good, none of it threatens our work, most of it helps and none of it gets in our way.

And yet at the moment I see people claiming that writers will be replaced by AI, or that writers can use AI in order to spend less time writing. I do believe that such people are the same ones who will tell you they’ve got a great idea for a film, they just need you to write it and they’ll split the millions with you.

But more specifically, I am now thinking of one claim in particular, a course that advertised itself as being how to use AI as your co-writer and muse. The workshop has been taken down so I can’t check the details, but I remember it being something about how AI can free you up to spend your time doing things other than writing.

Listen. Nobody is forcing you to write.

And if you have a problem with the thousands of hours it takes to write anything, the answer is not AI. It’s tough shit.

I don’t doubt that AI will get better, In fact, I think it will become so very much more useful for everyone that at some point quite soon we are going to forget the term “AI” and just think of it has how things work, if we think of it at all.

But if AI really does somehow get so good that it forges in the smithy of its soul the uncreated consciousness of its race, then I still won’t care. If you can’t be arsed to write it, I fail to see why I should spend my time reading it.

Or to put it another way, go read the script to Barbie and tell me anything but talented people could — or would — write that ridiculous, joyous, moving screenplay.