Where to start

Posted by William Gallagher

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

Posted by William Gallagher

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

Posted by William Gallagher

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

Posted by William Gallagher

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.

Kelsey Grammer supports Trump. Well.

Posted by William Gallagher

Benjamin Zephaniah died, Norman Lear died, and yet the thing that made me stand still for a moment this week was the news that Kelsey Grammer supports Trump.

It’s not like I thought Grammer really was Dr Frasier Crane. I would bow toward Glen and Les Charles, who created “Cheers” where the character of Frasier first appeared, and I would bow to David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, the creators of “Frasier”. I have read their scripts, I have ceaselessly admired their work, but surely I cannot really have thought that an actor was the character he played.

I think it’s interesting that this came out in a BBC Radio interview that was then cut short not by Grammer, not by the BBC, but by the PR people from Paramount+. They must have known that cutting the interview short would be a problem, but they presumably calculated — as far as anyone could in the moment — that the best they could do was damage limitation.

I don’t think it worked. I also don’t think that I am being fair — I didn’t hear the interview, I am commenting on something I don’t know. In just about every way I think important, I am wrong to be judging something I have no direct knowledge of, I am wrong to be disappointed in someone without giving him any opportunity to speak. I imagine that being unable to talk to me is keeping Kelsey Grammer up at nights but, hey, it’s not like I’m a Trump supporter.

I keep wondering whether Grammer watches Trump’s rallies. I can understand being Republican, I can understand disliking the Democrats, but I can’t grasp how someone can watch a Trump performance and think that the man is for anything but himself.

Honestly, I’m just staring at you now, perplexed. I also somehow resent how much time I’ve spent thinking about why I’ve already wandered away from the 2023 revival of “Frasier”. The short version is that this sitcom is just ordinary, where the original “Cheers” and “Frasier” were extraordinary.

That’s taken me weeks.

Hour for hour, I may even have thought more about that than about Grammer backing Trump.

I cannot have believed Kelsey Grammer is Frasier Crane, I cannot have even believed that he need be anything like the character he played.

And yet, the only thing stopping me from admitting to myself that I must have thought he was like Frasier, is that he also played the evil Sideshow Bob in “The Simpsons” and I don’t think Kelsey Grammer is psychotic.

Well.

Hysterical accuracy with Ridley Scott

Posted by William Gallagher

Ridley Scott has been countering reasoned criticism of the historical accuracy in his film Napoleon. “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No?” he is reported as saying in several variations. “Well, shut the fuck up then.”

There is a bit of me that can admire that because criticism is easy — I’ve been a critic before, I look like I’m about to be in the next couple of paragraphs — and making films is hard.

Only… no. Scott does seem to have had no interest in accuracy, but that appears to be less some new disregard for limitations, it’s his long-standing disinterest in the script. I cannot find this quote so I am possibly making it up, but I seem to remember Scott saying something along the lines of how he could make a great film out of a sock.

It would look brilliant, no question, but to me, it would still be a sock.

Looking brilliant will not hold me for the 158 minutes running time of Napoleon, and most definitely not for the 210 minutes of the promised director’s cut. True, that extended version reportedly includes more of Empress Josephine’s story, and actor Vanessa Kirby has said “I read every book I possibly could about her,” so as long as writer David Scarpa was also up for research, maybe it’s more accurate.

Yet I’m not wedded to historical accuracy, I’m wedded to making the best story possible. It’s just that if you don’t give a shit about the accuracy, don’t pretend it doesn’t matter. Write a new story instead.

Cutting remarks

Posted by William Gallagher

Last night BBC Four aired a combination of so many of my interests — passions, really — that it was startling. “Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” even managed, with those last two words, to put “Police Squad!” back in my head.

But intentionally, it was Doctor Who from the 1960s reworked for the 2020s. The most talked about and promoted aspect was that this black and white show has been colourised but for me the interest, even the excitement, was that it was edited. Instead of about 175 minutes over 7 episodes, it was 75 minutes in 1.

Losing up to 100 minutes from a story goes beyond the technical side of editing, the production side, and instead heads deep into editorial rewriting. So I’m fascinated by editing, I relish times when I’ve had to remove, say, one syllable from an actor’s line. Or how many times in making 58keys on YouTube — truly rather small scale compared to even 1960s Doctor Who production — I will include a note to “Cover Bad Edit”. I can’t get enough of how you spend so long writing things and then when they’re made, you realise you can lose eight minutes and improve everything, as long as you cover the edit.

Then I’ve written a lot about television history so just the change in sensibilities about how long it will take an audience to get a point, I am absurdly riveted by that. And here was a production that I suppose you have to say butchered the original show, I mean it took out more than half of it, but did so with absolute obsessive care for that 1960s story.

I watched all of the surviving episodes of Doctor Who over the last 18 months or so and consequently it doesn’t feel that long since I watched the original of this story. Which may be why I believe I caught every cut and every redone shot.

For the most part, for the greater part, a cut would take me out of the story but only to applaud how clever it was. We did get scenes where someone’s body and particularly their head would move too much between shots, but then I’ve seen that on modern shows when two different takes of a scene are used.

And the show must’ve had its equivalent of my “Cover Bad Edit” because so very many times it did precisely what I, again in my smaller way, do. I will cover a bad edit by finding something, anything, to put on the screen for you to see instead of the ugly edit behind it. In the case of Doctor Who last night, they many times did this by showing another part of the story. Sometimes that was so good, so well done. The dialogue from one scene would continue over the start of the next, like a pre-lap in reverse. So on the one hand, we were moving faster, we were into the next scene, but also it meant only the minimum dialogue needed to get the plot across was included.

It didn’t fix some of the odder points in the original show, though. In both versions, a Dalek is disabled by being shoved onto a rubber cloak. Then a few moments later, the characters pull the cloak out from under it to use for something else and it’s impossible to understand why the Dalek wasn’t recalled to life.

Then it did unfortunately add another odd moment because a whole sequence was replaced by two Daleks plotting. Presumably it was original footage format the show but their conversation was different and it was again a moment to applaud the cleverness of it all. Except it meant later on that Susan (Carole Ann Ford) knew something significant that she clearly did in the original but clearly could not in this new one.

Plus while the ending of the original is a bit rushed, at least in 1960s terms, this new version felt more rushed still. It felt like oh, okay, so that’s sorted, is it?

“Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” is a deeply impressive and simply remarkable piece of work. Except, as well as covering an edit by moving to the next scene early, it did also very many times it would show us a flashback to earlier on in the story. The first time it did this, I thought it was profoundly brilliant and as satisfying as the addition of the 1980s Doctor Who Cloister Bell sound effect.

The second time it did it, I thought it was brilliant too. By the third time…

There were points where this flashback and possibly flashforward lark was tedious. Watching the characters examine anti-radiation drugs left for them outside TARDIS, seeing it over and over again, painfully slowed down a story that was being sped up.

That was also noticeable in the parade of Thals, the goodies on this story’s planet — it wasn’t just the picture that was done in black and white in the 1960s — because they would come, go and die before you knew even their names. Quite often, we’d only hear their name after they’d been killed off. I think I caught the names Alydon, Ganatus and Antodus, but the lead Thal was definitely Anodyne.

I also think I saw the original too recently to be able to watch this version and just get into the story. I can’t judge it. But I can think a lot about how editing the original doesn’t remove its 1960s origins and replace them with 2020s sensibilities. If it were written again, it would be 2020s in pacing and style and the whole undertow of a drama reflecting its own times.

So now I’m off thinking about the differences between shaping a story when it’s being written and then reshaping it later when being edited.

I tell you, if “Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” had featured a big scene with chocolate, it would’ve been my perfect television drama.

Repeat at will

Posted by William Gallagher

I cannot repeat things. I cannot repeat things.

Okay, sorry, that was an obvious joke. But repetition is on my mind right now since I just put the bins out for the eleventy-billionth time – and because for some reason I’ve been watching a lot of interviews about Airwolf. And all I can think is that the theme to that show is ridiculously repetitive, and it is ridiculously repeated, too. In any one episode of this helicopter drama you expect to hear it at the start and end, but it is guaranteed to be played in full, in repetitious fullnessosity a minimum of once during the hour.

So there’ll be this armed helicopter, taking on other armed aircraft, or enemy somethings, or on one memorable occasion battling a hotel. We’ve all been there.

And the thing is, it works.

That theme, that desperately repeated theme, it works and it always works, even when you recognise that not only is this aerial battle editorially similar to last week’s but uses some of the same footage.

There’s a song called Not Sure Yet, by Andy Lange and I would like to quote you a lyric. “I’m not sure yet / about life / about love / but in time / I’m sure it / will all be fine.”

That’s not a line from the song, it’s the song. Its sung five or six times, no more than that, and when I first heard it played out in the show Leverage, I really liked it. Then I looked it up on Apple Music and the repetition kills me. That line, over and over, I get it, please stop.

So I’m conflicted. I cannot repeat things yet clearly I’m wrong to assume it’s always a dreadful thing, except sometimes it’s a dreadful thing.

Plus of course this is something like the 805th Self Distract blog, so I can repeat some things. But then I’ve just spent the morning correcting some tax stuff and got so into tracking down 89 pence I spent in March that this is the first ever Self Distract that’s late.

It’s not sloppiness, not laziness, it’s a defiant battle against repetition, that’s what it is.

Rejected by the best

Posted by William Gallagher

I may not be the tidiest person in the world, but I appear to have reached a new low. I cleared up a corner of my office yesterday and found one script from 2006, and one letter from 2007.

The letter was from Verity Lambert. Wait, I sound like I hadn’t seen it until now and that would be a hell of a story. But no, I read it in 2007, it was a rejection, I don’t remember how I felt about that and it took me a few minutes to remember what it was she’d rejected, but Verity Lambert. An absolute hero of television drama wrote to me, having read an hour script of mine.

And she did so in 2007, just months before she died.

She’ll always, but especially this year, be known for Doctor Who, but it was her work at Euston Films that made me a fam. She’s the one who refused to make Lynda la Plant’s Widows unless the widows of the title got away with the crime in the story. She’s behind Jack Rosenthal’s The Knowledge.

When she wrote to me, Verity Lambert was making Jonathan Creek, which I liked enormously for such a long time, and also Love Soup, which I think was a misfire.

What she wasn’t making was whatever in the hell this script of mine was. Not enough comedy, she said, though there were good lines, and not enough drama. That’s all, and that’s everything, and even if I were still trying to remember which script it was, I’d know she was right because she’s Lambert. She was Lambert. Mind you, Love Soup was poor.

I said that I found a script from 2006, though. It wasn’t the script she read. It was a radio play that isn’t long enough, isn’t good enough, but yet which I enjoyed reading and I think the core idea has potential. Seventeen years later, I might give it another go.

Actors and pencils

Posted by William Gallagher

About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I was writing a mammoth 150,000-word book about Blake’s 7 and while I relished the conversations I had with practically everyone, while I’m still friends with one in particular, the interviewee who was the most deliciously open and downright acerbic was writer Chris Boucher. And while I can’t find the quote now, I know he said something to me along the lines of how you should never give an actor a pencil.

We were talking about an unproduced Blake’s 7 script that actor Paul Darrow had written. I’ve read that script and it was poor, it also just didn’t seem finished, but I don’t remember it having precisely the actor/pencil problem Chris meant.

The problem he said — and he is far from the only writer/producer I’ve heard this from — is that an actor will write a brilliant part for themselves and the rest of the script won’t work. I’m not sure how I feel about that: I believe that the show comes first, to the extent that if the best thing for the project is for me to be chucked out, I’ll find the door. But then on the other hand, if I were able to act, I don’t know that I could resist writing myself a lot to act.

Plus I can’t count how many actors have told me that they had to turn to writing because it was the only way to get the acting parts they wanted.

And I’ve friends who are both actors and writers, and I would trust them all with pencils.

Funnily enough, those same actor/writers have mentioned feeling as narked as I was over actors like Lisa Kudrow who seem to truly believe they created the character they play. There’s an interview with her in which you finally hear the exasperated interviewer asking “wasn’t that in the script?” And she looks shocked, like she’d never thought to read that.

Actually, Gareth Thomas seemed a bit like that to me about his character Roj Blake. I feel I can tell you that now since he’s died, but then so has Paul Darrow, so has Chris Boucher.

And you know this is all on my mind this week because so has Matthew Perry.

I seem to remember there being some criticism of him when his book, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir” was released. But since he died, of course all you hear is the good stuff about the man.

Why I rated Matthew Perry, though, was a story I heard during production of Friends. Reportedly, he would spend a lot of time in the writers’ room. Specifically, he did that and none of the rest of the cast did. I seem to remember, but I’m not sure all these years later, that the writers asked him in.

I hope so. I mean, otherwise, he’s an actor barging his way into a script session.

I just liked the completeness of it. I liked how he saw the writing as vital. And amongst all of the tributes to him this week, I saw one that mentioned this business with the writing staff. The story claims that Perry would pitch ten jokes for each episode of Friends and would consistently get two in.

There’s no way to know now whether he gave himself those two jokes, but then that’s the thing. If you can’t tell that an actor is destroying the entire fabric of a show by giving themselves the best lines, then they aren’t.

I’m obviously pro-writer. I mean, unlike Lisa Kudrow, I read that pilot script to Friends and right there on the page it’s very good. I just see that television is better when everyone is working together and it always seemed that this is what Matthew Perry thought too.