So I’m reading the script to the pilot of Supergirl, the 2015 US live-action series, with this episode written by show co-creator Ali Adler, from a story by Greg Berlanti, Ali Adler and Andrew Kreisberg, based on the character from the comics. This is my 311th script of the year and I’m enjoying it until page 42.

Up to then, there are a couple of lines that I think clunk, there’s more narration than I tend not to like and my only actual problem with it all is the name Supergirl. But just as I remember thinking when the show was airing, Shirley Conran probably trademarked SuperWoman, and I have some distant, distant cloister bell of a memory of there being a Superboy some time. I think.

But it’s on page 42 of the 61-page pilot script that the lead character gets named Supergirl. She objects, as well she might. She’s been dubbed this by Cat Grant, the ruthless editor of a newspaper – a kind of Devil Wears Prada figure – and now it’s a toss up. I don’t know whether to feel bad for the actor who has to deliver the excuse for calling her Supergirl, or the actor who has to pretend to be chastised/mollified by the excuse.

That excuse goes thisaway:

CAT: And what do you think is so bad about “girl?” I’m a girl. And your boss and powerful and rich and hot and smart. If you perceive “Supergirl” as anything but excellence, isn’t the real problem you?

Good try.

This is one of the times in the pilot where the writer’s voice comes through like a radio playing too loudly for you to hear the character’s speaking. Another example is on page 30 when a character literally says: “Can you believe it…? A female hero. Nice for my daughter to have someone like that to look up to.”

The character saying that is a waitress talking to a customer who isn’t listening, but I think she was quoting the pitch deck for the show. The words were just too on the nose to belong on a character’s lips.

In the same way, the defence of the name Supergirl does not come across as the character saying what she believes, it is the writer telling us to stop going on and on about this, William. It’s a writer taking a problem name that dates the show, even trivialises it, and trying to write their way out of that. Which is no bad thing, but Adler is not just excusing the name, she is throwing the whole issue back in our faces like it’s you and I who are at fault.

So good try, but nope, it is not my real fault that you were stuck with a name created by two blokes in the 1950s.

Given that Adler is just about infinitely more successful a writer than I am, I’m sure she needs my advice. But if I had been doing this — and if I couldn’t change the name to Superwoman for IP reasons — I think I would’ve simply ignore the issue. Not questioned it, not highlighted it, just got on with it.

Which I offer is what probably was done for each of the show’s 125 episodes after this pilot. Nobody questioned it in those, no further writers tried to distract us from it with a slap to our faces.

You can use writing to get around problems. You can use writing to set a stage and guide people to what you need them to believe. This dialogue about the patronising name tried to do this and instead I think drew more attention to it.

That’s an example of the Barbra Streisand effect. But then it’s also a bad compared to — trust me on this one — how Steve Jobs wrote the story of the first iPhone. This is more relevant than you think, since there is yet another iPhone launch next week, but you’re just looking at me now, I’ll shut up.

I think that this is a time when we most need to be fully aware of the news, and also that this is a time when that is simultaneously easier than ever, and harder. Since Trump got in, I’ve shied away from news more than I should: haven’t seen a full news bulletin, haven’t watched more than a few YouTube videos, have unfortunately read quite a lot.

But not as much as I would have before, and not as much as I should, and I’ve told myself that watching drama and comedy is better for me. Watching some writing, filmed and performed. Only, last weekend I was in Paris and before I went, I re-watched Before Sunset.

It’s an absolute top-one favourite film of mine, but in it, main character Celine despairs at one point about how bad the world is and how we need to do something about it. Before Sunset was released in 2004. I couldn’t help myself. I said aloud, oh, bless.

That was my sole time thinking about news. The only other news I learnt during the entire trip was that Monica and Chandler have got engaged. I may be a bit behind on that.

And then I came home. 

This Paris trip was for a special occasion, not that you need a special occasion to go to Paris. But because it was what it was, I bought first-class train tickets for the run back from Eurostar in London to home. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before and it was so good to get free food that only costs you a fortune. Plus the train ride was more comfortable than any I used to have when coming back from the BBC.

But as part of such a ticket, you get access to a first class lounge at Euston. I have spent so many hours standing in crowds, waiting for the departure board to get to my train, waiting in the heat and the cold and always in the very most tired way. So nice seats — actually, just any seat — was a boon, and the air conditioning was almost good enough to stop me thinking about the impact on the environment. And they had two different sizes of Pepsi Max cans. 

The trouble is, they also had TV sets. And each one was tuned to GB News.

My welcome back to the UK was this foul channel. The sound was off, which was one blessing, so I don’t know what the show was. But watching it for a moment, I think it should’ve been called The Three Arseholes.

That’s what is being presented to people coming into the UK, and it is what is being presented to us. It sank me. I’m glad I got this view and could see how sickening things are outside my own bubble.

But I’m sorry, Celine. I have to go back to Friends.

First, can I say that if you’re a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, you’ll be getting a postal ballot soon, which includes where you need to vote for me to continue as Deputy Chair.

Okay, it’s the same spot where you could instead vote for either of two others who are standing for the post. Plus you’ll see a pitch from each of us and I think you’ll agree that the three candidates are strong ones. We need that strength more than ever now because these are such hard times for writers so I think it’s tremendous that there is a range of candidates for my job.

Er, I mean for the job. Obviously.

Equally obviously, if you have a vote in this, you must use it the way you think best. But I suggest it’s probably just more convenient to put a tick next to my name.

Look at me: next thing you know, I’ll be out kissing babies and doing hustings. Which I swear to god I used to think was a dance. Arguably, it is.

Anyway. This matters to me enormously and I don’t seem to be able to hold a thought in my head that I don’t immediately say to you. But it wasn’t what I wanted to say.

What I wanted to say was something that’s quite possibly naive of me, but I think is also hopeful — and at least this week, I think it’s true.

If you write, good things happen. If you stop writing, they don’t.

Now, I don’t mean that everything you or I write is gold and will be commissioned or fulfil a commission. I don’t even mean anything to do with whatever it is you’re writing. I mean the act of getting on with it, of writing even though times are hard, it does something for us.

For one thing, you can hide in your writing and I’ve had times when I’ve really needed to do that.

But also there is something about practicing our craft that seems to me to enable that craft. Hopefully I get better at writing over time, but if I do, it is solely because of writing a lot.

And here’s the example, the reason why this is on my mind this week even when the election stuff is going on. On Sunday, I finished a book project. I have not one thin clue what will happen with it next, except that I will doubtlessly restart it and maybe rewrite it, I don’t know. But I got to the end of a project I’ve put off for years.

As I was making every conceivable backup copy of that project, though, another equally old and long-running book project sprang back to life. I shouldn’t be this excited because it died quite thoroughly more than a decade ago, but I am absolutely giddy about it. Talking mile-a-minute. Remembering obscure anecdotes interviewees told me off the record when I was originally researching it back in the day.

I don’t really have a thin clue what will happen with this one. But I know that there is nothing like the absolute thrill of getting to write something that matters to you.

I’d tell you what the two projects are, except I suppose they’re secret and anyway, I’d be more mysteriously exciting if I don’t reveal it.

Tell you what, vote for me and I’ll tell you. That’s what you want from the Writers’ Guild, none of this fighting for our rights and our conditions and our money, you want obscure titles that will entirely make you shrug.

But truly, pushing on with writing, being unusually happy with what you’re producing, god, there’s nothing like it.

So just now, I was watching an interview with Warren Littlefield, a particularly well known US TV executive who was talking about the development of “Family Ties”. If you know it. it’s the 1980s sitcom starring Michael J Fox, and if you don’t know it, er, it’s still the 1980s sitcom starring Michael J Fox.

Anyway. Littlefield was praising writer Gary David Goldberg — and when a TV executive has even heard of the writer, they rise in my opinion — but specifically about how he was able to listen to what the audience wanted to see and where the audience wanted to go.

Television is a commercial enterprise, 1980s television was an extremely profitable one, and “Family Ties” is very good. So I can’t disagree.

And I don’t, really, except I realise that I want to. There is something about making a show to suit the audience that feels somehow wrong. It’s not like I’m against audiences, but I am against things like those choose-your-own-adventure books where the reader decides when to kill the monster. You can spin me as much bollocks about interactive storytelling as you want, there has to be a story to be told. And if you are expecting the audience to tell it, I see no reason why they should tell it in front of you.

Plus there is also the fan effect. The point where your show was so good and fresh that it got actual fans, but now things have tipped over an edge and all you want to do is please those fans.

With fans of any show, and really I think audiences of any show, what they will tell you they want will always boil down to more of the same. I’ve thought this before, we want to see something again but for the first time. We want to recapture how we were when we first saw it, and despite that being impossible, we can end up criticising a show for moving on.

No TV executive will ever agree with me, and I will never say they’re wrong, yet I think you have to write whatever it is that you want to write and hope that an audience comes along.

In other words, my Jane Austen week on 58keys was the most superb fun to make and though it didn’t do brilliantly in my viewing figures, I would do it again in an instant. I’d do it again for me and the fun, and I’d do it again for what great reactions I got.

It can’t always be about big numbers. Although maybe that’s just a failure of imagination on my part.

I’m not going to admit that I’m a bit confused this week, because you’d hear me. But something I have believed pretty stridently has been called into question — and it was called into question by me. I should never listen to me.

Here’s the belief. You cannot use a familiar idea, a trope, in drama and say that it’s fine because the audience doesn’t know it. That the audience is not as familiar with it as you are, that you are involved in drama so you know these things. I think that’s a bit grandiose on the part of the writer, and damn patronising about the audience.

I once refused to take a suggestion on a script because it was an idea I had seen something close to eleventy-billion times in other dramas. “Doesn’t matter,” said the suggester, “the audience hasn’t seen it before.”

I believe I managed to avoid saying “bullshit”, but the fella didn’t press the point so I suspect I at least oozed quiet anger.

And then there’s this week. I can’t tell you exactly what happened, partly because I’m not allowed to, mostly because I’m clearly an arse who wants to sound exciting and important. But during the course of this thing which did matter to me but otherwise isn’t worth your wondering about, I got into a discussion about a particular recent drama.

Actually, a couple of them. But one of the people I was talking with disliked a certain show because, as she said, it was all very familiar stuff with the same police tropes. I can’t disagree, she was factually correct, and yet I wanted to disagree because I really liked it.

Trying to vocalise this then, and trying to be clearer now, I think the issue was for me that this time I believed the tropes. In any police procedural drama there are going to be the same steps in an investigation and I’m accepting that as accuracy rather than repetition, I’m accepting it as authenticity.

Around those points, though, characters were reacting in the same ways that all characters do in these shows, and that was my colleague’s issue. Yet in this one case, I believed them. I felt the pain and the anxiety.

So I am demonstrably wrong. You can write what audiences are already familiar with and it can work.

I think this is just yet another case of how the answer is that you simply have to write it brilliantly.

In which case, sod it, I can’t tell you what I was doing this week, but I must tell you that the show is “Catch Me a Killer” and while the series main writer is Amy Jephta, the episode I wats talking about was by Oliver Frampton. In the UK, it airs on U&Alibi.

Not to say that my mind is all over the place but before I get serious about desks, there’s a story from childhood we need to half remember. I want to say that it’s from Br’er Rabbit but given my age that would mean I got it from Disney’s “Song of the South” and you and I are not going there today, so we’ll forget half of this and remember just the bit about how the rabbit does something bad. He’s done whatever it is, someone is going to tell on him, but he gets to put his spin first and so he’s fine.

The first version you hear is the one you believe, the one you prefer.

And quite rigidly so. I had to talk with a rabid Trump supporter the other day and she insisted, insisted, insisted on how everyone should check their sources and they must, must, must seek out all opposing points of view throughout Fox News.

Anyway.

For reasons I cannot tell you — and that you would not give one pixel of a toss about if I could — I’ve been required this week to watch a couple of episodes of “Patience”. I’ve seen several before, though as it happens not these two, and it’s a good show. Except since I saw it before, I’ve been watching the original French series it’s based on. If you don’t happen to know it, its “Astrid et Raphaelle” but streams in the UK on Channel 4 under the title “Astrid: Murder in Paris”.

It’s excellent. I was recently invited onto a radio show to recommend TV shows to binge on and I immediately wanted Astrid to be the series I enthuse about — but I’d been beaten to it by at least one person before me. I felt robbed.

Both these French and British shows are police procedurals in which an autistic woman working in a police criminal records department helps solve crimes. As ever with pitch lines, it doesn’t sound great and it does sound contrived. It sounds like the way Quincy was a medical examiner but he would go out on cases because that’s where the cameras were. Or how Charlie’s Angels would fight any crime, but preferred ones involving going undercover in bikini fashion shows. Someone’s got to do it.

No question, Astrid and Patience are contrived. The original eventually addresses this at length and turns it into a problem for the characters instead of for us as viewers. And the English-language version actually comments on it very early on. The core problem is that this lead woman is a civilian and there have to be regulations and laws and procedures that she violates by becoming part of the various investigations. If that sounds like nitpicking, like I know my Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984), then follow: Astrid/Patience have difficulty crossing a police line because only authorised people can. The two versions of this character stand there at the tape, unable to move until specifically authorised. You really feel for her, this difficulty is very well conveyed and that’s what makes these shows compelling, but it also means that whether I care about detail or not, they do, so skipping around the issue is TV logic.

Although, okay, you’re still thinking I nitpick because I knew that PACE act was 1984. In which case, let me pick: one episode of Patience I watched this week opens with a woman listening to her huge smartphone over wired headphones and it made me grumble. There’s no law that says a character has to have a new phone, but it was such a big one that it seemed new, seemed to be one of the more recent large-screen models. Yet it’s nine years since iPhones had a headphone jack and five since Samsung removed them too.

I can say this to you and I can say that the French original of this same episode did not have the same mistake in its version of the same scene, the same story. But then there are things I prefer in the British version, others I prefer in the French, and it’s all bits and things. I’d like to know why certain key decisions were made that make the stories different, but I can’t say one choice is better than another and normally I feel I can. I don’t mean I’m right or that you’d agree with me, I mean I can’t think of another example where I haven’t got both an very definite preference and reasons I think back it up.

For instance, this week I was also listening to Sheryl Crow’s version of Mississippi, a song I only recently learned was written by Bob Dylan. Then I listened to Dylan’s version. It’s so different as be practically laughable: it’s fine, it isn’t funny really, but it’s so dour and miserable compared to Crow’s version that it sounds like it was deliberately intended to sound miserable.

So in that case, easy. I prefer Crow’s take. But then I heard hers first. Just as I heard her version of “Sweet Child O’Mine” first and like it enormously, while people who first heard the original Guns N’ Roses version apparently do not.

Everybody prefers the first Doctor they saw in Doctor Who. Strictly Come Dancing is better made than Dancing with the Stars, if you see them that way around. The Princess Bride is an incredibly better novel than it is a film, unless you saw the film first and now entirely incorrectly believe that the novel is a shrug in comparison.

It’s not like either you or I sit here making up star ratings for things, but almost as if it’s a rule, I think there tends to be one version you like and one I think is at best an interesting copy.

I prefer “Astrid: Murder in Paris” to “Patience”.

Yet if all you can possibly get from this mess in my head is that I’m recommending Astrid, I am also recommending Patience. Perhaps if you’ve read this far, that’s what you need.

I’m just fascinated by two versions of anything and what sticks with you, what seems to land. During this week’s viewing, for instance, I kept being struck by how the lead detective’s desk is in the wrong place.

That’s the lesson here, as a viewer, as a recovering TV critic, as a writer. It is vital for drama that you arrange the furniture correctly.

And you thought the headphones thing was weird.