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.

Where to start

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A television drama producer told me once that I should watch the first two episodes of any series, rather than judging it solely on the opening pilot. She was right. I watched the first of Lessons in Chemistry the other day and it was fine, I liked it, but now I’ve seen the second I’m really into it.

That producer’s point, though, was that so much can happen, so much can change, between the making of the first and second episodes that you only get a sense of the series when it’s properly underway. With Lessons in Chemistry, a mini-series, I’ve seen no difference between the episodes, I’ve just got into the characters more.

I think that producer’s advice applies best to series instead of mini-series. A series is different because even if it ultimately is one story told over seven seasons, any one episode has to stand entirely on its own. Making a good “Previously on…” is an art, but even with that, a series has to keepre-establishing its characters and its format, even if it also gets to change and develop both of those along the way.

All of which is on my mind not because of Lessons in Chemistry from 2023, but from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels 1970-2009. I’m currently reading the 2009 one, the last before Hill died, and it’s fine. There are 22 novels in the series but by a fortunate chance, I began reading them with the fourth one, An April Shroud.

I can still see me, practically thirty years ago, coming across that novel at some car book sale or something. I bought it solely because as it happens, the TV version had just aired. Retitled An Autumn Shroud to fit the conditions at the time of year it was filmed, Hill’s book had been dramatised by Alan Plater and I wanted to see how he’d done it. The BBC Dalziel and Pascoe series would eventually turn out to run for six years too long, the worth of it dropping like a stone once it had adapted all of the novels to date in 1999, but back around March 1996, it was excellent.

The book was good, too, and so much so that even as I realised it wasn’t the first in the series, I began reading in both directions. I read the book before it and the book after, then the book before that and the book after that.

What I found was that, in my opinion, if I’d started with the first novel I would not have read on. If the one I’m reading now, Midnight Fugue, was the first I’d read, I don’t think I’d read on. For it seems to me that the Dalziel and Pascoe novels are on a bell curve, with the first couple and the last few being okay.

It’s the ones in the middle that are great. Bones and Silence, Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection and The Wood Beyond are each deeply absorbing.

So much so that Alan Plater agreed to work on the TV series on condition that when it got that far, he would be the one to dramatise Bones and Silence. He did, too.

Except there was a bit of a bell curve here, too. For some reason, and he either never knew or just never told me, Alan was not the first choice to dramatise Bones and Silence. The producers commissioned someone else and it seemingly went badly, because they then came back to Alan. Watch the episode now on ITVX and you’ll see the screenplay is credited solely to Alan, there’s no trace of whoever else did any previous version.

Only, I don’t actually recommend watching the TV version of Bones and Silence because — this is a technical term — it is utter shite altogether.

Here’s a really tremendous novel dramatised by one of Britain’s finest screenwriters of his day, and it’s unwatchable. Obviously that’s just my opinion, except it isn’t: Alan Plater refused to write for the series after this. I presume whatever the treatment he got was less than happy, I mean there has to have been something going on when he wasn’t the first choice to write it, but this is also a clear case of a director screwing up great material.

I don’t tend to notice directors. I’ve never watched anything because of who directed it, just as I have not once tuned in because of who was acting in a show. But I think directing is similar to writing in that if you notice it, it’s bad. And in this case, it’s truly appalling.

Bones and Silence on TV is not a story, it is a collection of arty shots that make you want to sit the director down and explain that you didn’t want a student’s showreel, you wanted a primetime BBC1 drama. What I remember from the one time I watched it back on its original airing was that it had flashbacks and flashforwards, that when someone mentioned a knife you would get an artistic shot of a knife from some other point in the story.

I just set it running again now to check that bit about the screenplay credit and found myself thinking this isn’t awful, it’s not very good but it isn’t awful, and then there was the murder. A woman is shot in a bedroom and for reasons passing understanding, the one overhead light in the room has somehow been knocked and it is flailing back and forth. Think Callan, if you remember that. Back and forth. Back and forth. With each back and forth it lights up the victim, the apparent murderer, some unknown other character, and the lead, Andy Dalziel, each one in turn.

For one minute and 15 seconds. That damn light, apparently the only illumination despite all the moonlight we’ve just seen outside, that damn light swings back and forth for 75 very tedious seconds. Its swing never shortens by a pixel, and the only reason it isn’t hypnotic is that the editing is so poor that the timing is out and that some swings take longer than others.

So if you came to the TV series and saw this episode first, I’m not 100% convinced you’d stay to the end of even the murder scene, but I am quite sure you’d be unlikely to try another one. Here’s the 10th episode of the show, based on the 11th book in the series, and its pants.

I think I might be on the verge of arguing that you should watch every episode of every thing, which is impossible and would also definitely mean watching a lot of tripe. I know I’m trying to argue that it’s worth giving things a chance, that good drama is so hard to make that any one sample of it isn’t a fair example of a show.

Yet there is so much we can watch now, so much that is so very good. We are definitely in a golden age of television drama, but it’s an age with so many riches that I’m not sure how any one series manages to rise up above the rest.

Getting it right by doing it wrong

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A couple of years ago now, a production company wanted to talk to me because a script of mine in some way reminded them of a series they were developing. You bet I talked, and while as it happens nothing came of it, I did of course learn the name of this then-forthcoming series: it was Slow Horses.

Being thorough, and because what they said of it did sound good, I read the first Slow Horses book by Mick Herron. And then the second. Third. Fourth. I’ve lost track of how many there are now, possibly seven, but I read the lot straight through and enjoyed them tremendously. Well, in these novels the lead character Jackson Lamb is so clearly Andy Dalziel from Reginald Hill’s books that it’s distracting, but I relished them, and I particularly enjoyed the third one.

The series was made, it is truly superb, and Slow Horses season 3 has just concluded on Apple TV+ with a dramatisation of that particular novel.

In so many ways, it was wrong. But it was all the better for it. And not just because, as from the start of the TV show, you would not connect this Jackson Lamb with Andy Dalziel without help.

The third book, Real Tigers, is a particular favourite and enough so that even before the TV version aired, I was surprised to realise that I could only remember two incidents from the entire thing. Then the TV dramatisation began and I did not remember anything it was showing me. Later, working overseas and without much internet for a few days, the book was still on my iPad so, what the hell, I re-read it.

Which means when I got back and was watching the rest of the TV version, I suppose I could have winced over and over for how many total changes there were to the story. But while I’d like to debate some of the decisions and I’m not 100% keen on how certain things were seeded before later being revealed, every change was totally in keeping with the spirit of the story.

And more importantly, every change was for the better, I think.

It’s enough to make me want to read novels, watch their TV or film versions, and re-read the novels more often.

Only, if I sound like I’m over-praising the show and particularly the writer Will Smith, I think actually what I’m doing is confessing to a failure of imagination on my part. Despite whatever that company saw in my script, I could not have written this dramatisation as well as Smith because — I think — I would have been too caught up in trying to be unnecessarily faithful to the text.

Let me give you two examples, one where I did at least wonder in advance how in the hell it could be done on screen, and one where I should have but simply didn’t. The latter first.

Without spoiling anything, there is a scene in the novel set in a restaurant. A character is waiting for someone, and then something happens outside. I promise you that it’s substantially more dramatic than this sounds, but on the page, there’s this character on his own, there’s this thing that happens, and it’s all very effective. Surprising, tense, it was altogether just very good.

In the TV version, there isn’t one character in the restaurant, there are three. And the thing that happens outside, happens to a different character on screen than it did on the page.

I’ll cheerfully put my hand up to how I would not have thought of changing that character outside the restaurant, as vastly richer and more involving as that change is. But I will put my hand up with embarrassment that I would not, or at least did not, think of having two extra characters inside the restaurant even though of all the changes, that was easily a completely obvious one.

Because for one thing it’s damn hard to have a character on their own without anyone to talk plot with. And for another, one of the two extra characters is Jackson Lamb. He’s the star of the show. In the 1970s or 80s, you would shoe-horn the star into every scene — except in Police Woman, where it is shocking how little-used the title character is — and we’re a bit more sophisticated today. But still, he’s the star, and moreover he would’ve been absent from the screen and absent from the story for too long if he hadn’t been added.

So putting him there keeps his story going, plus it allows for some abrasive interactions with the other two characters which are both fun and pushing the story forward.

I’d like to think that if I had been writing this, I would have come to the same conclusion along the way, but I sense that’s bollocks.

As it most certainly is for the second scene, the one I had remembered and was waiting specifically to see how it was done because I was clueless. It’s just a scene in a pub, a conversation, and while Something Happens, it’s comparatively low-key. Okay, it’s a single punch.

But the problem is that it centres on the character of Roddy Ho. Mick Herron writes this man so well, it is an utter treat when he’s on the page, but it is really one joke repeated myriad times in deliciously different ways. Ho is more than arrogant, he is entirely up himself and on the page, there are chapters seen from his deluded perspective. It is glorious reading his descriptions of what he thinks is happening while we get what’s really going on.

It’s just that every time I would read and relish one of those chapters, I would wonder how to convey that on screen. So when it’s done in season 3, episode 1, and is done so seemingly simply and effortlessly, it did throw me out of the story for a moment. Just to applaud.

There is, of course, one other change to the old days of Police Woman or the like. You can stop what you’re doing and go watch the whole show right now. Forget waiting for a particular night on BBC1 or somewhere, definitely forget everything you were supposed to be doing today, and go watch the show.

True, it is on Apple TV+ and yes, that’s another streamer in a sea of streamers whose names end in a plus sign, but it’s also another one that has a free seven-day trial.

Let me think. Three seasons so far, six episodes per season, you can do that easily. And then you can buy the books — Amazon USA, Amazon UK.

We live, we never learn

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We do quote, though, even if pointlessly. “We live, we never bloody learn” is a line from Jack Rosenthal’s The Knowledge. Good luck finding that on any streaming platform, though the script was published and I must’ve read it twenty times over the years. Actually, I haven’t read a script today: I must go find that.

And in any other way I can find, put off saying what’s on my mind.

But you’re looking at me now. Okay. This week Facebook threw up a memory with an image, a photo of me in my 20s, probably. Sitting at a BBC Radio WM desk, a Mark III Local Radio desk if you’re keen to be precise, and looking like I knew what I was doing.

I did.

The photo is staged, I now abruptly remember: it was a Saturday, I’d worked that desk all day, and it was late afternoon or early evening, when the shows were done, the work was over, and a couple of us were just coming down from the high and working up to leaving. So I know I wasn’t really watching for anything there, I wasn’t really about to bring up any audio, but I had been doing that for a good six or more hours before the photo was taken.

Here’s a thing, though. I liked those moments after a show, the peace after the mad rushing, the sense of a job either well done or at least not cocked up completely. They were halcyon moments.

But the hours before were not.

I can’t remember now what time I would start on a Saturday but it was late enough — perhaps 11am, perhaps noon — that there was plenty of time to do other things beforehand and just occasionally, I would try. Usually I’d spend the morning worrying about the afternoon. And as well as this image in front of me, what came back this week, what comes back now, is an image of me sitting in my car in a Birmingham city centre car park, with ten minutes to go before I had to leave for the studio, and with a fight going on in my stomach because of the nerves.

The shows I worked on then, those Saturdays, were sports shows and sport to me is in a parallel universe, it means nothing, I care nothing for it. And there were times when it would’ve been just a little handy to know something more about it, but the truth is that the topic doesn’t matter. What you have to do in order to deliver it to audiences is exactly the same, and so much so that things I was taught then I am using now, a preposterous thirty years later.

Only, there’s something else I’m still doing now, a preposterous thirty years later.

I am getting nervous. I’ve taken on a new project that in every way imaginable is straightforward, but it’s also very bitty and I’m anxious not to do any of the bits wrong, I’m anxious not to do them in the wrong order. I can’t tell you what it is, but then you can’t imagine how simple a production it is so we’re possibly even.

I know the nerves are not warranted, not in the slightest, and I mostly wish I didn’t have them so that something which should take a couple of hours doesn’t end up monopolising the day.

But equally, I’m thirty years older than I was in that photo and still I am feeling the same energetic nerves, still caring, still learning. I’m going to decide that’s a good thing.

Love Kittens Go to High School

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I want to enthuse at you about something and all you want to know is what’s this thing with love kittens and where they are. Let’s do a deal: I’ll explain a thing I feel this need to explain – while you just skip all of that and jump down to where it says It’s Safe Here and Also There are Love Kittens.

So, previously… I’ve read film, TV, radio and theatre scripts all my life but since December 2017, I’ve made sure to read at least one every day. I know I’ve learned from it all, but that wasn’t the point, the point was to have a good time. As I write this to you, I haven’t read one today but I will shortly and that will be my 570th of this year. Given that there are substantially fewer days in the year than 570, you can have a pretty good guess as to how this enjoyment thing is going for me.

Only, this has been an unusual year because of how many scripts I’ve re-read. I’ll often re-read scripts I like, but this time there were so many of them and it’s King Charles’s fault. I skipped watching his coronation and flicked channels instead, until I came in half way through an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” by René Echevarria and as I tuned in, a series regular, a hero, is faced with a dangerous situation — and he runs away.

He gets chances to make the “right” decision, as defined in paragraph one of the Series Hero Rulebook, and he doesn’t do it. I’d already seen it, a very long time ago, and read the script quite a long time ago, but I was hooked to the end. Which yes, did feature this character getting some redemption (Series Hero Rulebook chapters 7 through 19) but he didn’t deserve it – and he knew he didn’t. The redemption became part of everything terrible and I was enraptured all over again.

As I say, though, I came in half way. Where I was, there was no chance to rewind or stream the episode, but I could get the script so I did. (Note that this link downloads a text version. All other links here take you to a PDF online.) Then I read it and then I read the next one. And the next. “…Nor the Battle” is a fifth season episode and I went back to the beginning to read the pilot script. And then the next one. And the next. So yes, I re-read all Deep Space Nine scripts this year — and it wasn’t the only series I reread, it was just the only one where I could get all seven seasons of the scripts.

There is also Star Trek: The Next Generation and I have read all of those, but I tried a couple this year and they are surprisingly empty on the page.

So before I babble on at you about a top ten, I want to confess that of the 570 scripts I’ll have read by the end of today, an astounding — to me — 275 were repeats. Deep Space Nine accounted for 174, while I also re-read 13 Doctor Who, 21 The West Wing, 17 Frasier and 9 Cheers. Other substantial chunks of new reading for the year were 20 episodes of Inside No 9 and 41 of Fame.

For no very good reason, I’ve decided this time to have a top ten that excludes repeats like Deep Space Nine, even though the original pilot to Frasier, “The Good Son”, is as fine a piece of writing as the revived 2023 Frasier’s pilot “The Good Father” is ordinary. Plus there was one script I read for a book project and even though the script was never made, it’s also never been released in any way so all I am probably allowed to do is tease you about it.

I think we’re ready. Wait, it’s time for the It’s Safe Here bit.

It’s Safe Here and Also There are Love Kittens

“Love Kittens Go to High School” is the title of an episode of Fame by Susan Goldberg and it is without question my title of the year. It was sixth-season Fame and I’ve never seen it, but I enjoyed the script too. Not enough to make my 2023 top ten, but there was no possibility that it wouldn’t get a shout out for that title.

So now, the top ten, including links for you to read them — where possible — and entirely for me, the date I read them.

10. Community: Basic Rocket Science (aka The Fundamentals of Flight)
By Andy Bobrow. Episode aired 14/10/10, script read 12/8/23. The Community characters get stuck in a space simulator simulator (not a mistake, it’s a simulator of a simulator) and go nowhere, do nothing, but when they return, you feel like they’ve come from the moon. Read the script.

9. Paddington 2
By Simon Farnaby and Paul King. Film released 5/11/17, script read 28/10/23. If it were any more perfect, it would be higher up this list. Read the script.

8. Z Cars: A Quiet Night
By Alan Plater. Episode aired 2/10/1963, script read 14/2/23. Famously, nothing happens in this episode of the one-hour police procedural, but you come away realising that really the most enormous things have happened. Episode is lost and the script is only in this book.

7. Collateral
By Stuart Beattie, revised by Frank Darabont, Michael Mann. Film released 6/8/04, script read 25/7/23. A hitman hires a taxi to take him to each of his targets. One clear, simple idea, milked perfectly for drama. Read the script.

6. Dickinson: Split the Lark
By Alena Smith. Episode aired 29/1/21, script read 13/9/23. The show is billed as a comedy, on account of it being very funny, but the pain in it is a knife. Read the script.

5. The Cider House Rules
By John Irving. Film released 7/9/1999, script read 2/5/23. Irving dramatises his own 560-page novel into a 125-minute script — and it took years. The script is only available in this book, US edition, UK edition.

4. Poker Face: Dead Man’s Hand (Pilot)
By Rian Johnson. Episode aired 26/1/23, script read 2/9/23. Even the font and title design lovingly reminds you of the NBC Mystery Movie wheel that brought us Columbo, which is a clear enough inspiration for this otherwise very modern, very tense, very funny series. Read the script.

3. My So-Called Life: Strangers in the House
By Jill Gordon. Episode aired 20/10/94, script read 24/2/23. Finely wrought family and school drama, where over and over, the quietest moments are the loudest. This one made me teary. Read the script.

2. Silo: Freedom Day (Pilot)
By Graham Yost. Episode aired 5/5/23, script read 16/7/23. Utterly compelling drama in a claustrophobic space. Episode 3, “Machines” by
Ingrid Escajeda is unquestionably the most tense hour of television I can recall. That script isn’t available, but the pilot is. Read the pilot and note that the script is titled “Wool” rather than “Silo”. That’s the title of the book it’s based on.

1. She Said
By Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Film released 13/10/22, script read 1/5/23. The plot is the uncovering of Harvey Weinstein, but the story is of the scalding abuse of women and its acceptance by society. You think you know this already, but then you read this harrowing tale in one sitting where your eyes just never stop getting wider — except when you want to cover your face. Read the script.

It’s weird. I keep a list of this stuff so that I can quickly find a good one to reread — and because it somehow keeps me doing this thing I want to do, it somehow prevents me skipping a day and so falling off the wagon — and in a few days time it will be the new year, I’ll be back down to a count of zero. That’s rather cleansing, somehow.

Though it’s surprising how fast that count rises again.

Which reminds me, I need to go read today’s script. I wonder what it will be.