Ten years ago, possibly even fifteen, I was asked to find a book for someone. You’re in the business, they said, it should be easy. I don’t remember now what the title was or the author’s name, or even remotely what it was about, but I know it had been written by some reasonably distant relative of theirs and they were very curious to read it.

So curious, so intently interested, that to this very day I am blamed for not being able to find it for them.

Except, I did.

More than that, I found it in the first half an hour of searching, at absolute most.

Only, this book was self-published by whoever it was, so it wasn’t in any bookstores, wasn’t on Amazon, and since they weren’t selling it on their own website either, you had to think it was going to struggle to become a bestseller. But this someone wanted to read it, so I gave them the sole and single and unarguable solution: they’d have to ask their relative for a copy.

For whatever reason, though, they didn’t want to do that. Okay, it’s hardly my problem, I did the job, let them do what they will, or what they won’t.

It is a long time ago now so you’d hoped that maybe they caved and asked, or that surely they had forgotten it as thoroughly as I had. But I suspect not because the last time it was mentioned, I was again criticised for not finding this book. I had let them down, apparently. I failed them and I am a continuing disappointment.

Sometimes the only winning move is to walk away.

Totally unrelated, this is the 800th Self Distract blog post. Writing to you is part of my Friday mornings, you are part of my Friday mornings, and you have been for such a long time: thank you.

The BBC has cancelled its daytime soap series “Doctors” after 23 years. I actually remember orbiting some executive 24 years ago, when it was being planned and I was told off the record that the BBC was going to do a new soap that was either about a medical practice or, I think, lawyers.

It was a quarter of a century ago so I let myself off being unsure whether the alternative had been lawyers, but I can’t let myself off for not remembering who the exec was. It could have been Mal Young, who I interviewed for Radio Times when he was head of drama, but while he seemed a nice guy, he was really steeped in soaps to the exclusion, I felt at the time, of other drama.

Sometime around then, I wrote for a UK soap called Crossroads but was fired for the flimsy reason that I was crap at it. What they needed, I couldn’t write and what I both could write and loved to write, they didn’t want. I got them to reverse the order of two scenes in the mandatory story breakdown I was given, but I think that was my sole contribution to the show.

Doctors was different, though. While technically a soap, it also had a story of the day. Every episode would be some mixture of the continuing drama of these doctors and other medical staff, and one complete story. As a writer, you’d be told the usual huge amount of what you had to do with the continuing storylines, but the story of the day was all yours. I mean, it had to be approved, there were constraints, but you were creating characters, you were creating story, it was a lot freer and therefore, to me, more interesting.

Interesting enough that this executive recommended I try out for the show back whenever it was. I truly do not remember how I blew it, but I did.

And I also cannot, cannot recall how I blew it again a few years later when I got another go. This time I have a memory of being in the Doctors offices, I want to say that I was taking a typing test, but whatever it was, whatever I did, I failed.

I’m not doing very well for recollection today, and unfortunately that was a problem on the third time I tried to get to write for Doctors.

This time I’m shaky on when it happened – it was at least ten years after the second go – but I do remember everything else, I just can’t tell you it all. What happened was that I met a new producer on the show, I obviously said all the right things, he got me writing up ideas for the story of the day, and the wham, it all stopped.

What I presume happened was that he’d pitched me to the show’s executive producers somewhat later than he’d implied, they had someone look up their “Blew It” database and said no, not again. That does not sound remotely likely, except that officially Doctors was a training show for new writers. It wasn’t, it unfortunately never was, but this was the official line and it does seem likely that there would be things the show could point to as proof that it was really hot on new writers.

If it’s true that there is such a database or something like it, I’d have appreciated this producer checking it before I wrote him twenty detailed plots. (I’ve used two in plays since.) But then equally this producer would have really, really liked me to have told him that I’d tried before. I didn’t mention it because it never occurred to me: one failed pitch at least a decade before, another failed pitch back around the year 2000, it did not enter my head.

I felt very bad about that and I even had the impression that I’d caused this new producer some problems.

A few months ago, incidentally, he and I were both judges on a Royal Television Society Awards panel and we met on a Zoom call. He mentioned being very fond of his time on Doctors, I didn’t mention my blowing it.

For all its story of the day, Doctors was a soap and I’m just not a soap writer. I shouldn’t have even tried out for it, they were right not to use me. I think the obvious reason to pitch was that at times it’s been the chief route in to TV for writers, but there’s also that the show is made in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, where I live. It’s our soap.

When the news that it was cancelled broke this week, my first and continuing thought is for friends who are writers on the show, for people I don’t know who are writers on it, and for all that crew and cast who are abruptly out of work. The BBC says that the cancellation is for budget reasons but that it’s okay, all of the money will be still be spent on shows in the West Midlands, so that’s fine. Except that it isn’t. Even if the money stays in drama — the BBC keeps worryingly mentioning that the cooking show MasterChef is moving to the Midlands — then it will always cost less to make one more episode of an existing show than to create a new one. So there will be fewer hours of drama, there will be fewer opportunities for writers, actors, directors and all.

Oh. Grief. I really thought my memory was astoundingly poor today, but I have recalled something. That fact about it costing less to make one more episode of an existing show, I know it was Mal Young who told me that. It’s called the slot cost: how much does it cost to fill a particular hour in the schedule, or half hour, with a show. Whatever the figure is, it’s less when you extend an existing series instead of a new one because there are no startup costs, no extended development time.

Anyway, if my first thought was for the writers, my second with this. I’ve decided I’m never going to try pitching to write for Doctors again.

You know this: the more elderly someone is, the smaller their world becomes. There’s a practical reason in that at aged 100, you’re unlikely to go late-night limbo dancing, or at least not on a whim. But mentally, too, what’s in sight becomes an obsession and what is not, is dismissed.

It’s not a happy thing to witness but it was pointed out to me this week that it’s normal, that if I live that long, there will come a point when the same thing happens to me. There will come a point when my entire world collapses down into just myself and what is happening to me. I shuddered and asked if it could at least shrink down to someone else instead.

But here’s a thing. Yesterday I was in a school working with writers aged between 7 and 9. Writers and a toy rabbit. It’s quite hard to be serious when someone is balancing a rabbit on your head. And it’s now very hard to know what to do when a crowd of 8-year-olds start hugging you.

Anyway.

They were fun and clever and they wrote well, it was great. Only, watching them, seeing hundreds of other children going by, and trying to be useful talking to groups in the school library, I did wonder about whether their world was small. There’s a practical thing in that they’re not going to drive to the late-night limbo centre. But mentally, too, I’m wondering whether the fact that they seemed to be interested in everything is more that they couldn’t stay on any subject for long.

I wonder whether we start off with a small world and we end with one. I’m wondering whether we start being self-obsessed to the exclusion of everything else, and whether we end that way too.

It’s hard not to then also wonder whether we aren’t really like this for our whole lives and we just don’t see it.

And yet right now, everything is interesting, everything is exciting.

Obviously except football.

I want to be able to write something where the good guys lose, and I don’t seem to be able to do it. I did try writing a novel about the end of the world in which the world ends. But then while I was typing away, some bastard character saved it at the last minute. I threw that novel in the bin.

But recently, I saw a musical that did this thing about good guys failing and I can’t tell you which one because it would ruin it for you. (I wrote a piece about the musical for the theatre’s programme and despite not having seen or read the play before, I managed to accidentally nearly spoil the ending. So now that I am fully aware of how it ends, I am shutting up.)

Except the good guys lose and it’s still a kind of triumphant finale. I am struggling to think when else that ever happens in stories. It does in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but then it would, that series did everything. Still, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” by Ronald D. Moore (series 7, episode 4, here’s the script) is the only other example I’m certain of.

Wait. I was so careful not spoiling – buggersticks, I nearly named the musical – but I casually ruined DS9. That episode aired in October 1998, you’ve surely had enough time to catch it now, a quarter of a century ago. God in heaven: a quarter of a century. That was its original US air date, though, so it would’ve been sometime in 1999 when I saw it, which is merely 24 years ago. Phew.

I don’t remember seeing it then, but from the dates it would’ve been one I watched on a break at BBC News Online in the BBC’s White City building. Nostalgia, I haven’t got time for it, I’m too busy trying to create new nostaligiable moments.

Anyway.

That DS9 episode centres on a baseball match or something — it’s sport, I don’t know from sport — and the regular cast, the good guys, lose.

Maybe you can argue that Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement ends without victory for the good guys, but that’s a bleak ending. It’s a marvellous ending, but it’s bleak. DS9 and the Musical That Shalt Not Be Named are both upbeat.

It’s killing me. Upbeat failure.

I suppose the original film of Fame does it too, at least to an extent. That film is more about failure than fame and rather than characters bonding together they tend to become separated and alone. And then they do come together for a closing number that is so rousing it can bring a tea to my eye — I Sing the Body Electric by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford — but Christopher Gore’s script doesn’t aim to suggest they’re all happy again now.

It does occur to me that I am failing in my attempt to either find more examples or, more importantly, to write anything that has an ending which is failure yet triumphant.

Hang on, I’ve pulled off the failure, let me try this. I’m now going to go rewatch the Deep Space Nine episode and to track down the film the musical was based on.

It’s not a triumphant ending, and overall the stakes seem rather low, but I will enjoy that show and that film, so it’s up beat. A bit.

I’ll take the win.

Back in the day, when we all watched television either as it first went out or very nearly so, I used to overthink about high-rated episodes. Pick any show and there will be some episodes that were watched much more than others and the easy presumption is that they were the best ones.

Today with streaming, I think that might well be the case. You hear something was tremendous so you go look it up. Right now the series Suits is doing incredibly well on Netflix, for example, even though it ran on the USA Network starting in 2011 — and ending in 2019.

Meghan Markle acts in it, at least for the first few seasons, but I don’t see how it can be royal interest that has brought the show a second wave of success. Not since if that were the cause, it should surely have happened years ago.

I think it’s because Suits is very good. I’m suddenly reminded of hearing someone say that their teenage daughter’s favourite band is Fleetwood Mac. That would have been impossible for a teenager in any previous time except when the band was at its height, but now they are just another streaming group like anyone else. I can’t imagine how hard it is for artists to get found, but I can well imagine that bands are no longer restricted to having fans who knew them back then and have grown up with them.

This has all got to be a good thing, but as well as meaning life and reach for good work, I think it has also ended the unfairness of high-rated episodes.

Follow. Back when you couldn’t just order up any show and instead had to wait a week to catch the next episode go out, you could have a brilliant, brilliant episode that few people saw. Enough of those people raved about it that others tuned in next week to see what the fuss was about — and so next week’s episode is the one that gets the higher rating.

Whether or not it deserves it.

And equally, last week’s episode, the one that did warrant the attention, never got it.

This wasn’t all that long ago either. In 2003 or 2004, I can’t remember which, Ronald D Moore’s revival of Battlestar Galactica aired initially as two feature-length movies run on consecutive nights. I don’t know the ratings figures but I do know this: the first night did okay — and the second night did very well.

It was unheard of: part two of a show never exceeds the ratings for part one, except with Battlestar Galactica that one time.

Moore has said that he had assumed the second night’s ratings would be down and when he saw they weren’t, that’s when he knew the show would be picked up for a series.

In that case I think both parts were exceptional, so maybe I’m arguing against my own theory.

But the reason this is on my mind now is that if a good episode lifts the next one in the series, a poor one can end things. For instance, I really relished the Spanish series “El Ministerio del Tiempo” (The Ministry of Time) until it had an episode I couldn’t even finish. I never went back to the show.

And this one hurts a lot because there’s a show I wish I’d written, a show that is superb at so many things I relish, but it hit a similar bump. Only a little similar, but similar. Months and months ago now, I was enjoying “Leverage: Redemption” a lot until it had an episode that just seemed to clunk, I can’t explain why.

I also can’t tell you which one because I stopped watching the series and it’s long enough ago now that I’m blank. And if I feel bad about that because I admire the show’s writers, I also feel a bit stupid because earlier this week I caught a later episode in the series and it was excellent. And so was the one after that.

But it was only chance that I came back to it. I’d have missed out on a lot if I hadn’t, certainly, but there’s so much choice now that when you’re dented out of a show, you can be gone. I can be gone so easily.

I’m also wondering about all this now because I believe I have lost my chance to see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” in cinemas — and I appear to be okay about that. I wanted to see it, just obviously not enough. And while that appears to have been true of most of the cinema-going public, I wonder if this is proof that one instalment affects the next.

For I believe I am unusual in thinking that the previous Indiana Jones film was quite good — until about halfway through. Then it was shite altogether, and maybe enough so that even 15 years later, it put me off the new one.

Now I’m wondering whether you’ll read next week’s Self Distract. That’s going to worry me.

I did stay up to watch Trump arrive in Atlanta but then fortunately insomnia met the certainty of his giving a speech and I went to sleep. There’s that line in WarGames that goes “the only winning move is not to play”, and surely if anything, the only thing to do with Trump is ignore him.

Except you can’t make others ignore the man and — I’m obviously in a homily mood today — all it takes for Trump to get in next time is for good people to ignore him. Mind you, good people, politics, I can barely think of a couple.

I like to talk to you about writing and there’s no possibility that Trump has written a complete sentence in his life. But just as the most brutish, stupid man can be capable of surgically precise abuse of their partners, so Trump is shaping a narrative over and over.

I fell for it, too, watching live footage of an aircraft subtly bearing the name Trump, land in Atlanta.

He’s like when you have a tooth out and your tongue keeps going to the gap. But where that stops after a time and possibly corsodyl, one reason Trump keeps prevailing is that others join the narrative.

This is making my teeth hurt. Late last week — you know this bit, although it seems lot longer ago than seven days — Donald Trump did that thing of saying that on a certain day he would reveal definite proof of his innocence but then he cancelled the whole thing.

In the days since, the reaction I keep seeing is that it was his lawyers who told him to cancel. That this was actually a sign that he was finally listening to his legal team.

Bullshit.

There was never going to be an announcement, it was always pre-cancelled, and he got three news cycles out of it: the claim, the cancellation, then the analysis of him apparently listening to advice.

But what that inane analysis also did was give just a little substance to the announcement. Seriously. By focusing on this idea of him listening to advice, all of the news media chose to ignore that his proof was going to be nonsense — and that’s enough.

I would have liked BBC News, or CBS, or CNN, or anyone to say: “Tonight’s headlines: more bollocks from Trump. Now the weather. Or even the sport.”

Instead they were looking in the wrong place and by shining such a light on that part, on making such a big deal of lawyers allegedly telling him to cancel, they validated the claim that he had something.

Just enough.

Certainly just enough for his fans to believe a little longer.

It’s easy, distressingly and disturbingly easy, to mock Trump supporters for being fooled by the crook. Yet all of the media that considers itself unbiased, or which has run a thousand news stories about his demonstrable lies, every one I saw was taken in by this particular performance too.

And there I was, unable to sleep, waiting to see a mugshot and only persuaded to turn over — either in bed or the channel — by the thought of having to look at his mug as he basked in attention.