I want you to picture what I actually can’t quite remember, it was so long ago. But whenever it was, 16th or 17th century, I’m in a meeting at BBC Radio WM. I am so young that I’m probably only in the meeting because I’m too shy to get out of the room. I’m as of little use or significance to the discussion as the free copies of Radio Times you used to get on staff back then, and which may actually be why I went in there at all.

But they’re discussing Christmas schedules and staff rotas, and the issue I remember is how annoyed the programme director and the station manager were about a show. To my mind, it was a gift: BBC Radio WM had the rights to repeat a series from BBC Radio 4, a documentary series about the station’s home turf in West Midlands. To my mind, this was a show that was already made, and it wasn’t as if anyone was unhappy about paying a repeat fee. If there were a repeat fee, it so little concerned anyone that the subject didn’t come up.

To everyone’s mind, it was a first-class show, too. It was called “Teachers” and I think if it hadn’t already won awards, everyone who heard it knew it would. So quality wasn’t an issue, any costs weren’t an issue.

What was an issue was that each episode was half an hour long and the station wanted to run it in 15 minute chunks — and couldn’t. Specifically, it could not do this because the show itself just physically couldn’t be split in two. There was no break point you could make in the middle, there was no break point anywhere.

To my mind, that was a perfect half hour show, then. An absolutely perfect edit where every second was used, nothing was flab, you were carried along for the whole duration and no further edit was possible.

Unfortunately I don’t remember what happened next. I think they ran it in its intended half-hour lengths, but that may be wishful thinking. I’ve half a memory of being the person who played the tape out that Christmas but, as I say, it was so long ago that chocolate hadn’t been invented yet.

But I’m minded of this all week because I’ve had occasion to re-read a radio play of mine that didn’t get anywhere and I may be able to make an opportunity for it. I think I can say to you that it has the same tight editing in the writing, that each bit perfectly fits in with — and really even demands — the next part. Tight in structure, bound together by some gags that only work when they are slammed up next to one another, the comedy of counterpoint.

But the reason I feel I can say to you that this is a perfect piece of work is because it’s too bloody short. I need to find 10 to 12 minutes more material and so I’ve been looking at this sodding thing, completely unable to find where I can split it apart and add something new in.

I do see writing as knitting together a story, and so I do see making big changes like this as requiring you to first unstitch the piece. I’m not 100% sure now how similar knitting and stitching is, I may be mangling a metaphor. And if I’m not then, I am now: I picture myself holding the two unstitched ends up in the air, trying not to let them drop until I’ve got the new bit in and the concrete has set.

It’s a nice problem to have. It entails, for me, reading and re-reading the script, weighing each piece and spending a stupid amount of time just sitting and thinking. I don’t take a lot of time to just think so being forced to in order to achieve what I’m after, it’s practically refreshing.

And it’s good to be in that world again, it’s good to be with these characters. It’s even impressive — obviously just to me — how it’s so tight that there are exchanges of dialogue that are not remotely funny, except that they are because of precisely when they come and who says them.

It actually feels like proper writing. I hope I can get it away this time.

I have a feeling that I’m heading toward a criticism of how AI tries to write, but really what’s on my mind is how stories are more than plot — and the examples I’m thinking of were entirely human-written.

Follow. Earlier this week my friend Mark Braxton on Radio Times mentioned that 2025 is the 40th anniversary of “Edge of Darkness” by Troy Kennedy Martin. It’s a six-part BBC television drama that, if you had to tell someone who hadn’t heard of it, you’d probably say was about a police officer trying to find out who murdered his daughter.

But if you know the show, what you’re thinking as you’re saying all of this is that it’s actually about a detective who nearly becomes a tree.

Look at that difference, right there. First it sounds like an ordinary thriller, then it sounds insane. The truth of “Edge of Darkness” is that it’s somewhere between the two, especially since Troy Kennedy Martin was talked out of the whole arboreal ending, but also because the series is much richer than a police procedural.

The thing is, you can prove that. It’s demonstrable, because the story has been told twice, to very different effect, and that difference is all in the telling.

For the 1985 TV series starring Bob Peck was remade in 2010 as a film starring Mel Gibson. Okay, yes. But the TV series had music, in part, by Eric Clapton. So nothing’s safe. That said, Clapton’s theme music was exceptional and Gibson’s acting, in my opinion, was functional.

The two productions are the same story and, curiously, they’re both directed by Martin Campbell.

Mark tells me, though, that Campbell has said he doesn’t think the film works. There are specific story points and particular characters from the original that are not in the film, but overall it is really that there is just a functional feel to it.

The film is about who killed this woman.

The TV show is about Knights Templar and the Teutonic knights of the Marches and a battle waged over hundreds of years, now being played out against 1980s Thatcherism, Reaganism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The thing is, only that last bit about nuclear weapons is on the surface of “Edge of Darkness”. Yet that, plus all of the rest, informs the characters and what happens to them, it informs how things happen, and it truly informs the drama.

Now, I have a slight problem in that I loved the TV show. (I skipped out of revising for exams in order to see Troy Kennedy Martin at a day-long screening of the whole series in a cinema.) I loved it so much that I could not make myself watch the film.

But.

When Mark said this about the anniversary, I wanted to re-read the show’s scripts and couldn’t because my copy is in a box somewhere in the debris of my office. So instead, I braved it and I read the script of the film — because you can now find online.

It’s fine. Screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have written a thriller that works fine.

Unfortunately for them, it turns out that Troy Kennedy Martin’s published script book is available to read online in the Internet Archive.

I read the the whole series scripts, then I watched the start of the film and the first episode of the TV show.

Same characters. Same plot. But the film is a puzzle, the TV series is a story.

And in both cases they are what they are because of the words that were used and the words that were not used — but which inform the show and are absent from the film.

I would like you to tell me that this is normal and I think you’re kind enough to do it, but possibly not good enough a liar to be convincing. Still, I’d appreciate you having a go.

I think I’m programmable.

It’s always been the case that there is music in my head, there is never not music, and if it’s not always whatever I last heard, whatever I last heard can get in there and stay. It can also come out, actually: if I stub my toe, for instance, then rather than swearing I am at least as likely to burst out loud with whatever lyric I’d got to in the tune. People have looked at me for walking into, say, the side of a desk and bellowing out “Oh, Vienna.”

Only, this week, I think I’ve found that it’s also dialogue. Specific lines get in my head and keep coming out of my mouth, which is not uncommon, which I know is also called quoting, but this week it’s also the tone and the rhythm as well as the words.

For the other week I re-read some Sports Night scripts by Aaron Sorkin and this week I’ve been re-watching the show. The dialogue in that show is the fantastic thing about it, but the dialogue is also the problem because every single character speaks in exactly the same way. Every single character and now, at times, also me. I can only hope that my conversation has been as clever and with as much of an undertow of great humour plus shockingly moving emotion, but I’ve tried.

And then there’s this. Just now, right before we started to talk, I said aloud what is spelt out as (DUBIOUS MURMUR). If you don’t recognise that, you might when I tell you that as I realised I had just quoted Marge Simpson, I said (ANNOYED GRUNT).

You’re ahead of me here. Yes, I’ve been reading scripts to The Simpsons. Hang on. I’ve read 39 of them. Oh, why did it have to be 39 and not 40? That word you’re thinking now is never spelt out in any of the scripts, it is always HOMER: (ANNOYED GRUNT).

Fine. This is of no earthly use and I feel sure you’re starting to think this had better be going somewhere, to which I feel compelled to say d’accord.

Yes. I’ve also been watching Astrid: Murder in Paris, which is in French with subtitles. The other night two of us were leaving the living room and I automatically, unthinkingly said apres-vouz.

I’m telling you, it’s frightening and I am only now realising that I’m like this. I am programmable.

Like once I was pitching a radio thing about crosswords and I got so good at them, until the project collapsed and the entire subject left my head. Now I could no more do a cryptic crossword than I could find an ending to this sentence.

There is just one sole thing that is good about this. I thought I did well getting the voice of the Doctor when I was writing Big Finish Doctor Who dramas and if it weren’t the skill I thought it was, if it were just that I am programmable, still it worked out.

I just wish I’d paid more attention in school. Imagine if I’d read the classics or just had thought more about the French language instead of having a crush on the French teacher. I’d be so dangerous.

Whereas now you are. You now know that you can put ideas, dialogue and music in my head. It’s a good thing you’re so nice. You’d never manipulate me, other than to pretend that this all happens to you too.

There’s a show I like that isn’t called “Nobody Wants This”. Instead, it’s called “Nobody Wants This.” — with that full stop at the end. Or it is on posters and on screen, it isn’t in any reviews I’ve read or even just descriptions of it. Which may mean it’s not remotely important and I should have better things to do with my time than wonder about punctuation.

And yet, you know where this is going. Punctuation. As crucial as the words it punctuates. A comma in one place makes a line funny, an exclamation mark at the end ruins everything.

Although there is “Oklahoma!” and before that was this big, famous musical which I have yet to see and so can’t describe it to you in case you’re wondering which big famous musical it is, it was not big and it was not famous. But it was named after the state and it did have an exclamation mark. I seem to remember reading someone wondering how that went down with people at the time: did it get the same looks that, perhaps, “Nevada!” would today? Or “Mar-a-Lago!”

I don’t know if “Oklahoma!” writers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II ever explained why they had an exclamation mark. So far I’ve not found sign of “Nobody Wants This.” writer Erin Foster explaining her choice, either.

And for once, I don’t need to know a justification. The titles just feel right with punctuation. Oklahoma’s shriek conveys an innocent exuberance to me – I really should find out what it’s about — and the full stop at the end of “Nobody Wants This.” feels so definitive. Somehow the full stop adds weight to the “Nobody” part.

I don’t know what the asterisks added to M*A*S*H mean, except that I think the original novel or novels had no such punctuation in the title and it was the film that added them.

Then there’s Magnum, p.i., which uses both full stops and lowercase letters for private investigator. And Quincy, M.E. which uses full stops and capital letters for Medical Examiner. Except everyone called those shows Magnum and Quincy, which does suddenly sound like a title by itself. Magnum and Quincy: together they fight crime.

Speaking of crime, NYPD Blue had no truck with punctuation, while Sledge Hammer! did. Police Squad! In Colour.

Again, there’s no reason for any of this, no practical reason you can point at for why shows do or don’t use punctuation, and yet I seem to like it when they do. Maybe because somewhere I have a draft script called “Ophelia!”, which right there used up my entire allowance of exclamation marks for the year. (Yes, it’s a retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view. I just cannot accept that she goes mad because her boyfriend is in a wet tizzy. It’s years since I wrote it and it went nowhere, but I still like a key line where Hammy has been going on a bit and Ophelia gets to say: “Get thee to a summary.”)

Anyway. The original Star Trek films used to have colons in the title. The Star Trek films from 2009 onwards didn’t, but should. “Star Trek: Into Darkness” is practically legible compared to its actual title of “Star Trek Into Darkness”. Although the film was such an uncredited remake of an earlier film that its title should really have had “(Repeat)” in it.

Next, The Concord: Airport ’79 is an interesting mix of a colon and an omission apostrophe. But then I’m more interested in the film’s original title. Believe it or not, it was going to be called Airport ’79: The Concord. Someone probably ran a risk/reward spreadsheet on those two alternatives.

But a real surprise to me thinking about all this and checking what I thought I remembered, was When Harry Met Sally. It’s actually called “When Harry Met Sally…”, with the ellipses. An AI app just told me that Woody Allen made a film called “Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)” which is an interesting use of parentheses and asterisks, except AI hallucinated.

It’s actually “Everything”, not “Every Thing”. Good thing we’re not using AI for anything important.

AI also answered my question about TV shows with punctuation by noting that every episode of Seinfeld apparently has a title beginning with the word “The”. It’s not true, incidentally, as the entire first season breaks this rule, but the thing to note is that “The” is now punctuation. Good thing we’re not using AI for anything important.

I feel I could go on. I feel you feel I have done. But in lieu of a final thought ending with the brilliant words “full stop”, since I can’t think of any such thought, let me propose something. You having read this means that this is now in your past.

I would like to offer, then, that this makes what you’ve been reading be really a kind of period piece.

True, I prefer words to emoji — though I’m not a Luddite, I will change my mind the moment you show me emoji that rhyme or play me a track sung in emoji. But everyone agrees that emoji are just a bit of fun, that they quickly convey tone, and that anyway, everyone knows what you mean by an emoji.

All of that is bollocks.

Follow.

I quite often get sent a reply that consists of that icon of a face laughing and with tears running down it. Really? Did I really leave you laughing so hard that you cried? No. The odds are that I either vaguely amused you, or you’re sure I was trying to be funny, even if I failed.

So nope, I don’t know exactly what you meant and I offer that the emoji literally isn’t what you meant. Plus I think people unconsciously assume that the emoji you send me is the emoji I received, and it is not. There is an emoji standards body, but the symbol you see is the one that your device has made to comply to that standard. And the one I see is the symbol the makers of my device have decided.

Now, most of the time, that just means on average one of us is seeing a better version of the smiley face than the other, one team of graphic designers might be better than the other.

But then last year if I were sending you an emoji from an iPhone, Android, PC or Mac, but you were reading it on Twitter, there could be quite the difference. Should I have some reason to send you an emoji about a water pistol — apparently people do this — then I see a cheery water pistol, but you see a handgun. Tell me what tone that was meant to convey.

So emojis look different on different machines and they do not say what you meant. That leaves just the bit about fun and where you may well now be sitting, thinking I’ve segued into being a grump bloke. But you know where this is going and, yes.

Because in 2021, a single and apparently unambiguous thumbs-up emoji ended up costing the sender over $60,000.

There’s a lot to this and the superb podcast 99% Invisible covers it in delicious detail, but the shortest version is that it was over a contract. The person who sent the thumbs up claims he meant to just acknowledge receipt of a message, but the person he sent it to took it to mean an agreement to the deal they were discussing.

That 99% Invisible podcast episode also gives examples of how in different cultures or even just different groups of people, one emoji can mean many different things. And those meanings change over time.

Now, excuse me, I have to go the shops. Checks list: I need aubergine, peach, banana…

And that was going to be the jokey finish. Except I just looked up at my TV set and it’s on the YouTube recommendations page. Of which the recommended video right in front of me is mine, the one I made this week and for which I confidently believe I have made my worst-ever poster image. Yes. It has an emoji. I’d explain, but I want to run away now before you see it.

Red pills, blue pills, whatever. I once made it through the first 20 minutes of The Matrix by turning the sound off and enjoying the visuals for a bit. I want to say that I remember being persuaded to watch because it had this incredible idea at its heart, but that can’t be true.

Because before whoever it was who was telling about this had finished hinting at the film’s incredible core idea, I was nodding, saying, oh, right, the world is an illusion, that old thing.

Then this week I read an article that said Ascension was one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, that it was on Amazon Prime, but also that it was leaving in two days’ time so you’d better hurry. This would’ve been Tuesday, I think, so it’s gone now, but I watched the first episode.

It’s another show where the whole worth seems to be in its core idea. The show follows a generation ship, a starship launched from Earth in the 1950s and heading out on a 100-year journey to Proxima Centauri. As we join the story, the ship has been travelling for 51 years — and suddenly there’s a murder. That murder, said the article, upends everything and ultimately has the characters and you questioning their very existence.

Nope.

In the episode I watched, it did have the characters starting to question each other, but I’d already answered it. I even said aloud at the end, “you had 51 years to figure this out and I did it in 44 minutes.”

When the idea is all you have, it has to be a damn good idea, and neither Ascension nor The Matrix — in my opinion — have good enough ideas.

Maybe it’s just because all of this has been done before. I don’t remember where I knew The Matrix style story from, but I knew it before the film. And I’m trying to avoid the Ascension spoiler, but the same thing happened in Doctor Who back in the 1970s.

I think I’m saying that the idea practically doesn’t matter. There’s a reason you can’t copyright ideas and it’s because it’s the execution that matters. For me, that means there have to be characters that keep you watching. I can be absorbed by a documentary or an article about some tiny nugget of information — for instance, this week I learned that Sainsbury’s self-service checkouts will never give you a 10p or a 50p coin in change, and that detail is delicious. And a book about an enormous topic — say, Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto — can entirely occupy me.

But for drama, I need characters. I don’t think I’m alone in this: when I first knew him, Alan Plater once criticised my interest in plot over character, for instance. And among Isaac Asimov’s many faults, his total lack of interest in characters meant some deft footwork by the writers of the Foundation television series.

Clearly what works for me may not for you, I know. So if you’re going to argue that The Matrix has wonderful characters, I won’t disagree, but chiefly because it might end up with my having to watch the damn thing.

With Ascension, I felt the characters were slight enough that the cast had difficulty making them believable. Some did better than others, which probably also means that some characters were better written than others, but still it felt forced and I didn’t choose to binge-watch the lot before it disappeared from Amazon UK.

But then the writers of that got six hours of high-cost television drama made, and I have not. The Matrix writers got several movies done, and I have not. Even I would listen to those writers before I would myself.

That’s an idea.

Last week’s Doctor Who, if you don’t happen to know already, had an extensive scene you’d call meta: without spoiling anything, the Doctor and Belinda meet Doctor Who fans. In a way only this show can do, the show itself is fiction within itself and before this sentence gets convoluted, let me zoom to the end and just say that it was sweet. Self-aware, knowing, funny, but also warmly sweet and for me, no question, the highlight of the story.

But it’s got me thinking about how dangerous that is. I know that it’s very hard to get anyone into your story, any reader or any viewer, and once you’ve got them, I know it’s extremely easy to lose them again. Stopping a story, or seeming to stop it, in order to draw attention to how this is a TV show seems so risky that I doubt I’d ever do it if I were in that position.

And yet when it works, I think it can even draw audiences in more. It becomes a shared thing, the show and you the viewer, knowing this thing together, acknowledging what we both already know but put aside for the suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment of being carried away by the story. There’s also an element of time: even saying all of this to you now and so telling you that there was this moment in Doctor Who, that takes away something if you haven’t already seen it.

I think the clearest example of this is Newhart, the second sitcom starring comedian Bob Newhart. I get this one intellectually, I understand what the show did and I think I can feel some of why it worked, but I definitely don’t and now cannot ever get the punch that the show’s last punchline gave to its audience watching on its first transmission. Or apparently to the studio audience during the taping.

Follow. The clip is on YouTube so you can see it right now, but it’s meaningless. You need to at least know that there was an extremely successful sitcom called The Bob Newhart Show, and that later there was an at least very successful sitcom called Newhart. There was no connection between the two other than its star. No other characters were the same, no setting, no stories. And Bob Newhart played a different character. In the first show, he’s psychiatrist Dr Robert Hartley, and in the second he’s a self-help book author, Dick Loudon.

Fine. But come the 184th episode…

At the very ending of the whole eight seasons of Newhart, the studio has been set up to hide the last set, a bedroom. And the moment that set is revealed, before you even see the characters in the bed, you can hear a gasp from the studio audience because this is the bedroom from the first show, Newhart. They recognised the set.

And then you get to see the characters, of which one is played by Suzanne Pleshette — reprising her role from the first series, The Bob Newhart Show. The story claims that the entire run of this Newhart series was a dream by Dr Robert Hartley. And in the space of a few lines, Hartley manages to mock some of the recurring criticisms of the Newhart show, pointing out the absurdity of some running gags, and getting a few last laughs in.

As I say, you can see the last scene here on YouTube. I don’t know where you can catch the full 325 previous episodes of the two shows in order to fully get the gags, but.

If you’re going to do something, you do it: an apologetic dream sequence wouldn’t have worked, a half-hearted one-liner gag would’ve been rubbish. But still, Bob Newhart himself says how nervous they all were that the idea was right or not — and, nicely, properly credits whose idea it was. And then Suzanne Pleshette has said the same thing, plus how she skipped out of the wrap party afterwards because it was a wrap for their show, not hers.

But compare that to the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. That show had gone off the rails, if you ask me, and there as a self-awareness that just told it that only Trek fans were still watching. So it became a kind of fan-service series, and when it was cancelled early, I think it was a shame but I’d long stopped watching.

It was more than the end of one series, though. It must’ve been cancelled in 2005, which means there was an unbroken run of Star Trek shows from The Next Generation in 1987. An unbroken run, with overlaps, of four different series set in the same universe, for 18 years. The last episode of Enterprise is treated as the last episode of all of them, and it’s really written as an edition of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I think that just as with Newhart, you needed to know the Next Generation to understand the Enterprise episode, but I also think it didn’t work. Instead of capping a long run, it seemed to negate Enterprise. It relegated the Enterprise cast to guest characters.

Maybe that’s because the whole last episode was done like this instead of being a final moment’s capstone like Newhart. Maybe, though, it’s just the old thing that the Newhart one was better written.

Maybe it’s the old thing that you can write anything, so long as you do it brilliantly.