I mean, yes, the actual news is that there’s a Doctor Who event in London this weekend. And of course big news is that Big FInish is announcing the new companion for the Colin Baker Doctor Who stories.

Then the kicker, the real detail alongside the news, is that this all takes place during a gigantic sale of Big Finish audios that is going to entirely consume what they paid me to write for them.

But that’s what I’m focusing on. Only with you, okay? Only because you understand. Forget news, forget Colin Baker, forget new companion, forget bargains: I am signing autographs at this event.

In theory, anyway. It rather depends on anyone wanting my autograph. So you may find I go very quiet about it on here afterwards.

If you’re going anyway, if you’re now tempted by the news and the bargains, it would be a treat to see you there. I’ll even sign anything you like, bar cheques.

Full and proper details of everything are on the organisers’ official site.

William

“My name’s William Gallagher, I’m a dynamic young force in writing. Don’t tell me I can’t write something, just tell me where the paper is and watch me fly.” Gallagher flicks his hair and smiles that rogueish smile we’ve come to know from the opening title sequence. “Don’t tell me Shakespeare’s better, I don’t know from any Shakespeare. I just know he didn’t give writing 110 percent like I do, nor maths neither.

“Words are my life: I was born with a crayon that I still use for cheques. When I go to the beach I wear a diphthong, and if you can’t correctly use the word myriad in my company, stand aside for a man who can – every time.”

It’s been a tough journey for Gallagher but if he thought mastering the keyboard’s shift key would be enough to see him through, now he’s really got to face the challenge of his entire writing life.

Our top-class judges – Jeffrey Archer, Dan Brown, the Estate of Enid Blyton and Cheryl Cole – mean business. Gallagher must complete this blog: it must reach all the way to the end. The slightest hitch and he’s out of here in the car we call the dreaded write-off.

Coming up: will first-day nerves destroy his chances? And there’s a calamity over the cap of a biro. I’m Vacuous Poorly-Paid, don’t go away.

Welcome back. We’re following William Gallagher as he attempts to beat first-day nerves and hopes against hope that he can get the cap off his biro. But what colour pen will it be? Join Claudia to find out later in Writing Blog Challenge 2011: The Extra Sentence on ITV7.

But here, right here, right now, our would-be writer’s journey is just beginning.

“I know I’ve got it in me to reach the end of this blog,” says Gallagher. “I’ve beaten scores of people to get even this far. Emily Dickinson, for instance, I really rated her chances, I thought she was the one to beat, but she fell at the first hurdle because she couldn’t even write the correct website address of the blog. Kept saying it couldn’t be three ws and nobody writes ‘forward slash’.

“Then Carrie Fisher wrote cleverly and wittily but it turns out the one thing she just can’t write is the correct account username. Aaron Sorkin, Alan Bleasdale and the men and women who wrote The Simpsons back when it was good, none of them could go that extra step and pull off entering my correct password.

“I did have a sleepless night when I learnt Paul Auster guessed that I was one of the many who always use the password ‘myriad’. But he just threw his shot away by turning in a draft blog about a character called Paul Auster guessing a password to let him write a draft blog to turn in to a writing contest. It was embarrassing. I didn’t know where to look, to be honest.

“So now it’s down to me. The blog is mine to lose but I’ve practiced, I’ve worked hard, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I’ve prayed and now I know I can achieve this. It’s inside me, it is. And I also know that the judges are 109 percent behind me.”

Archer looked up from his Blackberry. “Never heard of him,” he said. “And I’m billing you for these 12 words.”

“I’m dead anyway,” said the Estate of Enid Blyton. “What I really miss is ginger beer.”

Dan Brown said: “William is going to look at the blank screen and I just know he’ll be reminded of the Knights Templar, The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici), commonly known as the Knights Templar, the Order of the Temple (French: Ordre du Temple or Templiers) or simply as Templars, who were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders.[3] The organization existed for approximately two centuries in the Middle Ages and what they didn’t know about blogging then, nobody did.”

“You’re so right, Dan,” said Cheryl Cole. “That’s like exactly what I was going to say.”

Coming up: Gallagher has to take the plunge and switch on his computer. Will the epic journey of waiting for Word to load take its toll? Will the computer even get that far without every writer’s most-feared demon, the blue screen of death?

Welcome back. The epic Word journey has begun and –

“I’m on a Mac, it started ages ago while you you were off on the commercial break,” claims Gallagher. “I’ve written half the blog already.”

Brave words from the man who only dates women with names like Polly Syllable or Paige Turner and who so far never date him back. He’s got to be hoping being crowned Yet Another Blogger will change his fortunes.

But in the meantime, behind the outward signs masking the inner hidden turmoil of the apparently calm but really invisibly visibly quaking man, things have actually got off to a very bad start.

Gallagher, taking what was surely the deepest breath of his life and giving us the most up ever of thumbs-up signs, crosses to the writing desk –

– but there’s a chair already there.

“I tell you, I wasn’t expecting that, I haven’t practiced for there being a chair, it just wasn’t in the plan,” he says. “There’s no indication I can see of how to use it or whether it’s even meant to be used. I have to be think that someone could be simply storing it here and there is no way to tell. This is huge. This could wreck everything for me.”

With time ticking away, Gallagher has to make a decision. But he knows only too well that if he gets it wrong even a little bit, he’s going to have backache for the rest of the day.

He’s taken the plunge! He’s gone to sit on the chair –

and he’s missed!

This is terrible!

“A chair is a stable, raised surface used to sit on, commonly for use by one person,” explained head judge Dan Brown. “In ancient Egypt chairs appear to have been of great richness and splendor [citation needed]. Fashioned of ebony and ivory, or of carved and gilded wood, they were covered with costly materials, magnificent patterns and supported upon representations of the legs of beasts or the figures of captives. During Tang dynasty (618 – 907 AD), a higher seat first started to appear amongst the Chinese elite and their usage soon spread to all levels of society. By the 12th century seating on the floor was rare in China, unlike in other Asian countries where the custom continued, and the chair, or more commonly the stool, was used in the vast majority of houses throughout the country.”

“Golly,” said the Estate of Enid Blyton. “Really, just a little ginger beer, it’s not that much to ask.”

“Now you owe me for 21 words,” said Archer. “Plus VAT.”

Coming up: can William Gallagher recover from this disaster? Will a set-back mean a set-to with the judges? Will there be a stand-off over the standfirst?

Then just who is going to lose their cool over a paper jam – and who will get hot under the collar about the cost of replacement ink cartridges? Don’t go away now.

Finally, a horror trailer I don’t have to watch – not because I haven’t the nerve or the stomach, though you know that’s true but because I’ve already seen the film. What tattered nerves I had left after hearing about Stormhouse were entirely shattered watching the film at a Bafta screening.

I am now, therefore, totally without nerves. Consequently, I want you to watch this but I plan on washing my hair for the next 54 seconds or so.

I have never reviewed a book here before and I do not do it now because it’s seven million years since I last blogged, but rather because I am burning to talk and to try persuading you to buy a book. Specifically, Bossypants, an autobiography by Tina Fey.

Do you want a star rating? Five out of five, ten out of ten, take your pick.

It’s a very funny and warmly clever book: somehow I think you can miss how difficult that is to achieve because you just expect Tina Fey to be funny and clever.

I’m probably not the intended audience for this book – and I don’t say that because I’m a man. There is, though, a nice moment toward the end when Fey wryly acknowledges the sense (in the book? in the promotion? in my ignorant presumption?) that the book is aimed at women. “If you are male,” she writes, about a metaphor she’s just used involving tampon strings, ”I would liken it to touching your own eyeball, and thank you for buying this book.”

Early on she also refers to “us women” but effortlessly makes it both including for women readers (I presume) yet not excluding for men. I can’t explain grammatically or linguistically how she pulls that off but she does. And perhaps with that line, certainly with the book as a whole, she’s become a writer I admire as much as I enjoy.

The reasons I’m really not the intended audience, though, are that I’m in the UK where Saturday Night Live is quite little known, that I’ve only seen perhaps three episodes of 30 Rock and that I didn’t know she famously has a scar. I knew enough to have formed an impression of Fey as being funny and smart, which meant I read an extract of this book online, which then inevitably meant I bought the book.

I think she does a generally excellent job in neither over-explaining her career nor assuming you know anything about her at all. The only time I was confused was over references to “MVP episode 204” or similar. Is that a 30 Rock term? Is it just a general American one I don’t happen to know? I know “Most Valued Person/People/Professional” but I don’t understand the episodes part. If you want to tell me I am stupid and missing the obvious, I will completely believe you.

Looking back over the book, I think Fey is a technically very accomplished and talented writer but, best of all, you don’t stop to think about that as you first read it. She sounds alive on the page with such energy and verve that it’s an exciting and fast read. She’ll do jokes that rewardingly take pages to play out and then have ones that are quick and just deliciously, delightfully silly. I laughed aloud many, many times; I sat shaking, shaking more times and I read most of it beaming like this woman was telling me these stories to my face.

I’m going to say that I hope you don’t see this as a recommendation per se, more an urging you to buy it. I do have criticisms but not of the book or Fey per se, only with the presentation in iBooks.

The first line of every chapter is followed by an ugly linespace gap because there’s a kind-of drop cap at the start. Then Fey uses a lot of footnote gags but for some reason they are all bundled at the end of the book: not as endnotes, they are one-note-per-page footnotes that are clearly meant to be read alongside their main pages but without any clue what those pages are.

That meant I rather glossed over them but they also added significantly to the page count, which meant the book was really finished some 20 pages before the end of the iBook. When you’re trying so hard to make it last, that came as a blow.

I hope Tina Fey writes more books and I’ll be getting the box sets of 30 Rock now.

To be fair, I’ve done it very badly. If you’ve kept up with my occasionally incessant nattering on twitter then you’ll almost certainly have seen me posing and sometimes that will have been about this. If you’ve caught up with my updates on Facebook then you’ll have seen me wobbling about it. But, until now, I’ve not said to you here that I wrote a Doctor Who audio play.

You thought it was going to be something more exciting. But it is for me and since I tell you everything, I actually don’t want to focus on that play, I want to examine why I’ve been so reluctant to talk about it. More than reluctant, I’ve positively refused to write to you about it. I will tell you right away that this boils down to how I tell you the truth here.

So you know immediately that this is me, it isn’t you. People who get Doctor Who, who have it wired into them as I and so many of us have, they’ve all been very generous. People who don’t get Doctor Who but see that I do or see why it’s such a hard show to write for, they’ve been tremendous.

Yet I’m of course fully aware of how small my Who is in comparison to the hundreds of Doctor Who stories out there. Equally, I know it’s tiny next to the, say, twenty-part BBC Radio 4 serials I stuff my ears with. My little Doctor Who is a trifle, but hopefully a nice trifle. To be clear, what I wrote was one single 25-minute audio episode of Doctor Who starring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton from the TV show. It guest-stars Susan Kyd, who has a particularly fantastic voice, Duncan Wisbey who can and does play just about every character in the piece, and John Dorney, who took my Janson Hart character and forever, for better changed how I’d heard that character on the page.

My tale is called Doing Time and is third of four such one-parters on the release Doctor Who: The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories. Those other stories are by Jason Arnopp, Rick Briggs and that same John Dorney who by now is just showing off.

So I find I’m in good company and I think my piece stands comparison. It’s as good as it is because of my working with script editor Alan Barnes, director Ken Bentley and Big Finish producer David Richardson. On the recording day, Peter Davison asked some smart questions and we all improved it on the spot. I love that drama is a collaboration yet I also love that when you listen to the four plays on this release, you know it is impossible that any one of us could’ve written any of the other stories. Doctor Who is freeing and alive and open to myriad ways of telling stories – even as it’s, technically, an extraordinarily hard format to write for. Let me buy you a drink and lecture you on how Doctor Who, of all things, is not about time.

That’s a slight problem for me because, dramatically, time is my big thing. I don’t mean time travel, I mean time: it seems to me that time is a prison and the best any of us can do is bang on the pipes a bit to pass messages on. I’m interested in how we change over time, how our perceptions of events can be utterly reversed just by when we start to observe them. I am particularly drawn to how none of us can ever undo anything we’ve done. Living with what you’ve done, living with something you cannot live with.

You can see why I didn’t enjoy writing for Crossroads.

And you can see why I’m drawn to the TARDIS. In fact, for as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve fantasised about the day I could type the scene heading: INT. TARDIS.

I’m still waiting for that. With Doing Time, I couldn’t work the TARDIS into the story and instead I got a true shiver running through me the day I wrote my first line of dialogue for the Doctor. All he said in it is:

DOCTOR: August, I think you’ll find.

Doesn’t sound like a classic right off the page, but I could hear Peter Davison’s Doctor saying it in my head as I typed. And a few months later I heard him outside my head.

I remember working out when I’d had a million words published in magazines or whathaveyou; can’t remember now when that was but it was before I went freelancing in 1996. In all those words then and all these words since, I’d not had a shiver, not expected to, not heard of anyone else having them. But there it was.

Only, I still couldn’t wedge the TARDIS into the story without some almighty contortion and I so wanted to. I did it, actually, I got it in there in the first draft. I almighty contorted. But the aforementioned Alan Barnes just looked at me. Actually, he looked at me down the phone but I understood. “You’ve almighty contorted there, haven’t you?”

So, no TARDIS and anyway, Doctor Who is not about time. You can think of examples where it is, especially in Steven Moffat’s very best stories. But on the whole, the TARDIS is a vehicle to deliver the Doctor to where the trouble is and that’s it.

Yet, as I say, it’s time and not time travel that I’m interested in. Long, long before I got to pitch to Big Finish, I was thinking about what time means to the Doctor. On the one hand he’s very old so his perception is different to ours. (There’s a lovely line by Johnny Byrne in Arc of Infinity where Peter Davison’s Doctor says: “Oh, you know how it is. You put things off for a day and next thing you know it’s a hundred years later.”)

The Doctor also darts about a lot. Never stays anywhere for very long. It’s a function of the series and its need to get him on to the next story but it seems to me that this is a key part of him. I wanted to know what he would feel if he couldn’t leave, if he knew for certain that there was nothing he could do but stay somewhere.

So I put him in prison.

Locked away with the absolute knowledge that he was going to be there for a year.

I think I was originally going to be serious to the point of boredom. You may feel I do this. I think I was very intense about it all when I worked on Doctor Who Adventures magazine and found editor Moray Laing knew his Who a thousand times better than I did. I owe Moray for a great time writing for him, I owe the then-deputy editor Annie Gibson for the same thing, but Moray also led me to Big Finish. Helen Hanff has a nice line about Q, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, where she thanks him in a dedication saying that it is “not to repay a debt, but to acknowledge it.”

Moray introduces me to Big Finish and – at least two years later – I’m writing for them and Alan is pointing out that I’ve started my script by describing the prison doors as being like the ones in Porridge. You don’t have to be serious about being serious, we concluded. Then Jason Arnopp gave me the great title Doing Time (I’d been wedded to Folly, the name of the planet it’s set on, and later Cool Hand Doctor) and we were off.

If you write drama then this is all old hat to you but despite everything I’ve done – a little TV, lots of little theatre, many radio projects that failed at hurdles – this job taught me why drama is the hardest and the most rewarding form of writing I know.

When you do it right, you are telling a story using only what people are not saying.

I’m a dialogue fan and I’ve had rows where, much later, I’ve realised my opponent believes dialogue is speeches (“Is this a dagger I see before me and if it is, can I use it to win this argument and save all the yapping?”) where I see it as speech (“Yeah, I’m fine”).

There are plenty of speeches in Doing Time. Plenty more where I maybe too-literally explain the action in dialogue. Hard to like that. But my favourite thing in the whole story is what happens to Nyssa: while the Doctor is in prison, his companion has got a year out there alone on an alien planet. You hear many scenes with her and I’m proud of them, but the majority of her story takes place inside your head and I’m much more proud of that.

I’ve said before that I don’t believe one can be taught scriptwriting. I think you can have your eyes opened, though, and a thing that did this to me – I may have told you this before, I call it a Damascus moment – came from something Russell T Davies wrote. Before Doctor Who, I was a fan of his for Queer as Folk and its sheer verve. In the liner notes for the DVD release, he talked about the difference between writing for soap and writing drama. He’d had to learn this, he said, and realised that it boiled down to one major thought: in soaps, people say everything they’re thinking; in drama they don’t even know what they’re thinking.

Boom. Seriously. Eye-popping boom. I already knew that in drama we lie, I hadn’t thought that we were the mess we are in real life. Scripts I wrote after that day are better than the the ones before and what more could someone give you?

Possibly they could also give you how to wedge a very complicated story into 25 minutes but I accept that is an unreasonable thing to expect from a DVD liner note.

Still, writing Doing Time, I have Nyssa not quite aware how much she’s enjoying her time outside prison with a man we never meet. Then I have the Doctor not quite understanding why she seems so happy when he’s frustrated at being stuck there. I wanted Nyssa to have a life and, importantly, a job away from the Doctor. I gave her that and I also ended up giving her a flawed romance; I think now that the romance was one beat too far. When you have a woman character, it is cheap and easy to give her a romance storyline and so of course I think I was wrong to do that. If I never do it again, I might let myself off because I did also enjoy the tale and Sarah Sutton played it with the light touch I wanted.

But this comes right back to why I haven’t told you any of this before.

Hoping to never do that type of romance story again, to not do it cheaply, means that I’ve been hoping to write more Doctor Who. Of course I have.

But it’s more than that. So long as Doing Time was all I’d done, I found couldn’t actually enjoy it. I tried. I know without question how excited I would’ve been as a boy if you’d told me this is what I’d do. And Big Finish did a tremendous job. But I’m just after telling you how it felt to write what turned out to be a successful Doctor Who story and so far as I was concerned, it wasn’t and couldn’t be a success until it led to something else. Unless it led to another Doctor Who: if get another one then you really did do your first one right. Or right enough.

I do write to explore these things that obsess me and getting to do that is a privilege. It’s not luck and it’s certainly not chance, but it is a privilege. I obviously write to eat too. But my overriding goal of writing is to keep me writing: I’ve got to know what happens next, I’ve got to keep writing and keep writing better, like.

I was commissioned this morning.

I’m writing a four-part Doctor Who drama for Big Finish.

Actually, if you want to be completely accurate about it, I’m not but I should be. I’m commissioned, I have the deadline and when I learnt this earlier today I punched the air. I must’ve also shouted “Yes!” a lot louder than I thought or perhaps forgot I was at Radio Times because suddenly there were all these people looking at me.

I’ll deny this if you tell anyone else but I nipped out to a wide area by the stairs, away from everybody, and I span and span and span.

The deadline is tight enough to cut into that joyous exultant release and actually I’ve moved on to gulping about telling what’s a rather complicated story that still won’t feature any scenes in the bloody sodding TARDIS.

Fortunately, I can put that out of my mind because you and are I talking. I thought this would be when I’d gush at you, finally able to enjoy Doing Time, and yet there’s a part of me that is using you to put off writing the next bit. I’m using you. I’m a horrible man but you’re very nice and I thank you.

Listen, the deadline on this script is really tight. But that also means it’ll be over soon and I can get right back to worrying about whether I can get another one. I’ve got to stop worrying like this: you really need to give me a talking to.

You’re so the only person I can tell this story to that I am convinced I may have tried before. But I have a new ending. Can I have a go at talking about Broadcast News?

You remember the film, of course, it was released in 1987. I really liked it – I’m a journalist, I’m a drama nut and love dialogue so a movie about news written by James L Brooks would have me grabbed whether or not it starred Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks – but I also particularly enjoyed the soundtrack by Bill Conti. At the time I didn’t believe an album had been released: I think now that there was one but only in the States and this was pre-internet. This was a disappointment for two reasons: obviously I wanted it, but I also wanted to know what a particular French track is that gets played in it.

Flashforward to the DVD release a few years ago. For some reason I still can’t find a listing for a soundtrack album but I’ve bought the DVD – and I rip the end-credit music.

It’s on my iPod now. Lasts about five minutes and of course it has the orchestral music score parts in it, maybe a bit repetitive now, maybe I like it more for having liked it then, but there it is, the main score theme. But it’s also got other parts of the music, including not only a long segment of that French track, but also for the second verse, the sound of Albert Brooks singing over it in character, just as he did in the film. And it’s even got a version of the bit of the film when people come into the news studio to play their syntho-sequency-type new theme for the bulletin: a cheap synth with them sing-explaining along the way “NEWS! NEWS! The strings take the melody! LAAAA la da daa daaaa – COUNTER MELODY! Da dad daaa daaa dadaa a adaaaaa BIG FINISH – ba badda BA!”.

I adore this five minute slice of the film.

And a little while ago I realised something. Call me slow.

But this slice has the French track in it.

It has a substantial part of the track.

You know Shazam, right? It’s an iPhone app, one of those that just makes you go wow. Hold your iPhone next to a speaker, tap a button and Shazam “listens” to the music. Then it trots off, finds what the track is for you and gives you various options for buying it. Really, very impressive stuff to see in operation.

So I saw it in operation. I played my Broadcast News rip and when it got to the French track, I tapped the button.

The track is “Edition spéciale” by Francis Cabrel and I bought it.

It’s in my ears right now. Hear thirty seconds of it yourself on the US iTunes Store or the UK iTunes Store.

It’s taken me 24 years to find this song. I am singing along to the same bits Albert Brooks does and this, specifically this, is why you and I should both be glad this is not an Audioboo entry.

It does strike me that for a blog about writing, and by a writer, I’ve not often talked about writing and How To Do It. This is very bad because of course without me, what hope have you got? I know you look to me for leadership and it’s a burden, I won’t pretend it isn’t. So it’s time I gave you the Secret.

Perhaps you want to be a Hollywood A-list writer, perhaps you want to be the next Shakespeare. As someone who is neither, I am willing to share the secret at no cost. I feel a need to break the sarcasm for just a second and mention that if nothing else I do write for a living and have done so for most of my career. And now you, too, can benefit from my brilliance. Please, hold your applause.

I ask only that in return for the Secret, I be allowed to ask you to do something and that I then get to wibble on about My Most Unexpected Influence. Do we have a deal?

I’m going to pretend we do or this is a short blog.

The thing I would ask is that, if you’re a scriptwriter, write dialogue. If you don’t write dialogue or if you think dialogue doesn’t matter, there are many career opportunities open to you in retail.

So, now, the Secret.

Park your bum on the seat and write.

That’s it. I accept PayPal.

What I’m saying is that I don’t think you can be taught to write. I think you can learn to shed certain things, I think you can be exposed to influences that shape and improve you. I’ve been on courses where types of writing, such as thrillers, have been analysed in such a way that they made me think, that made explore ideas. But then I’ve been on courses where I’ve been told exactly how to write soap. I’ve sat in talks where an expert has given us all the precise steps on how to get into TV and I’ve known, actually known, it was bollocks. Demonstrable bollocks.

Alan Plater used to teach at Arden and that’s a course I wish I’d gone on. But – have I told you this already? Stop me if you know it. He told me that the best thing he did was to enable a writer, to let someone write. There was a particular guy who just wanted, just needed, to be left alone in a corner to write. Alan talked to him every now and again but otherwise, that was it. You could argue that he should’ve been able to sit at home and do it rather than pay whatever Arden charges for courses, but it took the course, it took Alan, it took being allowed to write.

I should do research before I talk to you: I’ve forgotten again who the guy was. But later on he thanked Alan the night he won his first Bafta.

So I’m saying you don’t need the course parts of a course, you need the time and the focus. When you’ve parked your bum on the seat, you can get this at home too.

Follow. Earlier today, I was faffing about doing no work at all and half feeling guilty, half-enjoying. I channel-flicked on the TV and came across an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s not Alan Plater, but I’d forgotten that I do regard that show as the best course in TV writing I ever took.

I’m not saying it’s the best TV show ever. One of my first newspaper articles was a feature about DS9 and I gave the pilot a fairly bad review: primarily because I found the acting in it to be so very poor. But you know Star Trek is a big, big business: I read years ago that it had earned Paramount over a billion dollars and a lot of that came from the merchandise. If it could conceivably become a shrinkwrapped product, it was and as the barrel was scraped, eventually there came the last thing possible. With barrel tar in its fingernails, Paramount sold the scripts.

They released two CD-ROMs (do you even remember CD-ROMs?) containing all the scripts to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That’s 354 one-hour screenplays, all wedged into some annoying faux Starfleet screen designed to fight you reading a line. But you could easily prang the scripts over into Microsoft Word instead and read them there.

So I did.

All of them.

Now, I’ve seen most of The Next Generation and enjoyed it well enough, but the scripts were a chore. Really a struggle. I would not have realised it until I read the scripts but The Next Generation wasn’t made of what I’d call stories, it was made of puzzles. What is causing this technobabble problem? How will the Enterprise escape? Once you knew the answer, because you’d seen the show, the scripts had nothing else. No meat, no real characters. If you’re a fan, you’re disagreeing with me and I’d be on your side if I hadn’t read the scripts and found this.

Can’t remember how long it took me to work through the Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts but it was a long time. Possibly years.

I’m surprised that I made it, and more surprised that I then turned to the Deep Space Nine ones: I’d had a bad experience with TNG and I hardly knew DS9 beyond giving it a bad review in The Independent. But this was a chance to read seven seasons of scripts, to see how a successful show starts, finds its feet, moves on and progresses and concludes.

Besides, two scripts in to Deep Space Nine, I was enjoying them. Real characters bitching at each other, enormous political and religious pressures, a lot more wit than TNG and good people doing bad things, I flew through the scripts in a couple of months. They read like a novel.

I liked them so much I began watching the series and I began really gingerly with that pilot. By now I knew the characters extremely well, I knew where the show was going, I was going to like the pilot more. Yes. But only a bit. The acting is still startlingly poor. I watched it again tonight (I bought all seven seasons on DVD) and it looks like every scene was shot at 2am and odd line readings are left in because they had no more time.

I know that a lot really were shot at that time, too, because if DS9 was a great TV course, there’s a book that I am equally a fan of: the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion by Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block. Can’t remember what it retailed for when I bought it but I just looked for you on Amazon and it’s changing hands for £95. Well worth it. It’s billed as being about the backstage stories of the show and it is, but it’s really about the writing: every one of its 176 episodes is detailed with interviews with the writers and producers. What the original idea was, why it changed if it did, how it worked, why it was successful and – this is really key – why it wasn’t. The episodes the writers wish they’d never done. That makes it more believable when they speak of episodes they are proud of: this isn’t a promo piece, it’s you sitting down with these writers.

I went back to the start. I’d read the script, I’d watch the episode, then I’d read the Companion’s notes. What did I agree with, what worked for me, what I didn’t and didn’t.

I wish there’d be something like this for Lou Grant or Tutti Frutti. The Beiderbecke Affair. The Sandbaggers. But I have a lot of respect for Deep Space Nine and right now, I’m really tempted to read it all again.

I can’t promise it’d be any use or interest to you, we all have to find what works for us, but maybe we have to be willing to look in unexpected places. And reading scripts, reading scripts, reading scripts. That’s also part of the Secret. So:

Park your bum on the seat and write.
When you’re not writing, read scripts.

‘Ere, let me give you a head start: those 176 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine scripts are now all online.

Shush now. I’m off to read episode 1, Emissary, by Michael Piller.

And then sit down to do some work.

This is a lie but I believed it for a whole week: I would have been happy whoever won this year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Wait.

I mean, I would’ve been happy whichever one of these particular three won. Let’s not get carried away. Matt Baker, Pamela Stephenson, Kara Tointon, any one of them could’ve won and whichever one pulled it off, I was certain I would be happy.

Until the gap between the two shows. Twitter scuttlebutt had it that Pamela was doing well: people trying to phone vote for her seemed to be having more difficulty getting through than others. So much for Twitter, but I realised that in fact I would be very disappointed if she beat Kara.

Then we came back from the break and Pamela was out

And I was disappointed again.

But maybe you don’t want me to detail my minute-by-minute disappointments and satisfactions, you don’t want me to count my blessings or alphabetise my woes. Instead, let’s look at the big disappointment of the night.

The show dances.

I’ve looked forward to these all week and none of them worked. Pamela’s was the best by a considerable way but it wasn’t tremendous. Kara’s timing was worse than mine and Matt’s had great, great and three times great moments but an hour’s wait in between each one.

You didn’t hear this because you weren’t here but Angela said it first: the show was wrong to make them do four dances. If they’d given us three and padded out the time with more Take That or something, perhaps there would’ve been chance for the show dances to be polished.

Yet, despite the highlight of the night being weak, this really was the best final we’ve had in years. Now it’s perhaps easy to see and to say that Kara was certain to win but at 7pm on Saturday night, you did not know. More, there was no Christopher Parker, no Ann Widdecombe. There was no one who seemed to be incorrectly favoured: to this day I smart over Darren Gough snatching the trophy from Zoe Ball back in 2005.

Grief. Five years ago. I should probably get over that.

I do think Matt Baker was incorrectly marked or perhaps not incorrectly, more unjustly. His opening dance was a rousing, roaring start and it put him right back in the very top of the frame for me. I have no technical knowledge, no technical skill, I do this by what connects with me somehow and I thought he had it there.

Then Kara had that same thing tenfold so to give her marks that were close to the heavily criticised Matt seemed wrong. I don’t often disagree with Craig but saying she was better than last time and then giving her the same score had me looking at him. Yes, exactly like that.

I’ll let him off eventually: you know I’m not one to bear grudges. I can’t bear them at all.

And part of Strictly is its friendliness: writer Ken Armstrong commented on Twitter that: “If I had to say a difference, I would say that ‘Strictly’ is a good-natured show while the ‘Other One’ is not. There was camaraderie and delight from contestants in the friends they have made. It seemed real.”

He’s right: it’s one of those observations that seems obvious once it’s been made yet I’d not thought it before. Strictly is built on a spirit that seems to extend out to its audience and I’m going to miss that.

Because it’s Sunday night and there’s no results show. Tomorrow there won’t be an It Takes Two. You’ll be aware that next Saturday is December 25 when there’s some big quasi-religious event, Doctor Who or something, but there is also a special Strictly at 7pm.

John Barrowman and Ronni Ancona are among the new celebrity dancers. What did they feel when they were asked? It must be fantastic to get the call from Strictly but then to be effectively told it’s a one-off and you’ll never get the main series, how does that feel?

And while I’m asking you questions, what will Kara and Artem have to talk about now?

Myself, I’m going back to blogging about what we write and what we write with, when we can be bothered to write. Strictly is out, my own prattling is back in – starting shortly with my Doctor Who audio. But that’s another story.

Thanks for the comments and the tweets and the nattering. That’s why I did this on my own blog this year when, for production reasons, it couldn’t continue on RadioTimes.com.

So, altogether now: keeeeeeeeep nattering.

William

Okay, I give in. The pink frock, the beauty of the dance… You were right, I was wrong: I do have a crush on Kara Tointon. Oh, stop looking so smug.

Obviously, then, I needed her to get into the final but actually this is the first year I’ve ever watched the semis with my fingers crossed. It was essential Kara got in, it was essential Gavin got out. I also wanted Pamela in so thereafter it was a numbers game: how much I would care if Scott was out, how bothered would I be if Matt left.

Not that much, really. But on the narrowest of balances, I did want Matt and we’ve got him.

Only, I may have changed my mind a little because of some news. But speaking of news…

Remember that odd moment last week with Len talking about the best-ever Viennese waltzs? Catherine explained the mystery in the blog comments here: “I think the best Viennese waltz comments were directed at Alesha then Kara, but the camera didn’t allow us to see Len pointing to Alesha, only Kara so it came across as a bit confusing.”

Then the whole question of whether the swingathon was prerecorded or not. We have the answer. A friend of a friend was at that edition and reports that it was live. I don’t know the friend of the friend but I do the friend and if it’s Strictly, she knows.

But because she also knows other things, I’m going to pretend she doesn’t have a name. She is sans name.

Let’s call her Sans.

Sans also told me: “Bruce’s duet and the pros’ dance (for Sunday) were pre-recorded that night, however. Also, Matt was furious with his comments, with Scott and Natalie having to try and calm him down afterwards. Ironic how things turned out.”

It’s a disappointment but it’s not a surprise. Instead of the now slightly tedious two-shot of the couples coming out of the studio door and happening to find a camera crew there, this week we just saw Matt fly by pursued by a studio assistant.

It might even have been the very same studio assistant who had to get Gavin and Katya off the floor after they failed to notice they were ejected from the swingathon. Though the show probably has more than one, you’re right.

What to think, though. Kara was an obvious choice for the final for me – oh, get off my back, it’s her dancing! – and Pamela was obviously right to get through for her dancing too. And part of me would like to see Pamela beat the Strictly casting, the way she was picked to fill the role of the older contestant who bows out early.

I’m just not sure now about Matt. We saw him give a quiet sob and I admit that did make me warm to him. The man’s caught up in the emotion, thats what it is.

So I’m pretty sure I still prefer him in the final than Scott and I do so because his dancing is better.

It’s a bit like the Dancing with the Stars final: I didn’t like Jennifer Grey as a person but her dancing was terrific.

Mind you, she was up against two total non-dancing no-hopers in her US final where the UK one could go any way, could really have any of those finalists lifting the trophy.

It’s been a very good year for the show in every sense. Next time you hear Tess Daly asking someone about the pressure of dancing on live TV, listen for the numbers she uses. At the start of this series she’d say “What’s it like dancing in front of 10 million people?” It’s steadily gone up until this week she asked Gavin about the pressure of “14 million people”.

I think she even had a little glee in her voice. And quite right too.

You think I fancy Kara Tointon and there is a tiny chance that the next thing I’m going to say is going to convince you.

She has tremendous legs.

Now, hang on just one sentence: she has fantastic arms, too.

I was thinking when we watched Pamela and James tonight that – well, first I was thinking that her dress was dreadful but then I was enjoying the dance. And then I went back to the dress. That frock’s job was to show off her legs and if I meant all this the way you’re thinking that I do, then yes, Pamela Stephenson has good legs.

But there is something wrong. There’s a kind of lag to her leg movements. It’s not that she has heavy or big legs but they look heavy, they don’t have this much-talked-of musicality in them.

Whereas Kara’s limbs are all preternaturally light and moving: she doesn’t seem, for instance, to be lifting her legs in a kick or flick, it feels that it’s the music lifting her.

This is why she’s described as a natural and I completely agree that she is, except that I completely disagree that she should be called it.

Maybe Kara is a natural but somehow saying that diminishes her work. I got ratty tonight at Len for nicely telling Gavin he was unlucky that his dance hadn’t suited him because he claimed that Kara’s had been right for her. I do believe that certain dances work for certain people but the implication was that Kara hadn’t had to work.

She did. You do not get to be that good, you cannot ever be good without work.

It’s great that Kara Tointon makes dancing look easy, but we’re not supposed to be stupid enough to ever think that it is.

Mind you, did you hear Gavin on one of the video packages? “Counting? You mean that 1, 2, 3 thing?” Did you understand Len’s thing about the two best Viennese waltzes being Kara’s one?

Then did you hear Bruce Forysth’s jokes? No, I wasn’t listening either, I was looking away.

Much like the judges must be during poor Matt’s dance. I don’t really doubt them, they are three professional judges and Alesha Dixon, but they did feel harsh tonight. So much so that Matt Baker was visibly crushed and so much so that I felt crushed alongside him.

Crushed. It’s a funny word: so similar to “rushed”, which Matt and Aliona then were.

I don’t know if tonight’s show was really done live: it felt so but if it was then Matt and Aliona had very little time to get changed for the swingathon. They could’ve done it, we’ve seen fast changes before, but while I don’t question that they could manage to get into the next costume that quickly, I do question the fairness.

Not just because the swingathon was all about stamina and every other couple had time to recover from their dances. But because if it were live, then Matt was on stage again just moments after the worst bruising he has ever had from the judges.

I found I wanted him to win the swingathon. If the phone lines had been open tonight, I might’ve voted for him.

I mean yes, Kara’s dance was everything I watch this show for, but I would say that, apparently I fancy her rotten, don’t I?

Harrumph.