An extraordinarily long time ago now, a colleague emailed me a Word document that I couldn’t read. It opened, but it appeared to be completely blank because, as it turned out, it was written in white text on a white background.

Or rather, it was read in white on white. The writer had set her PC up so that Word was in what’s now referred to as dark mode. She set the background to be black, set the text to be white, and it worked perfectly for her — but made the text look blank on anyone else’s machine.

I can’t remember her name, can’t remember the sequence of events, but I can remember the acrimony I got from her. Not only was this a trivial fix once you knew what had happened, but it was something she’d chosen to do — yet it became a stand-up row in which she loudly blamed me for it.

There were other undercurrents, we certainly didn’t get along, but there was also an irony that I did see even then: we were colleagues on a computer magazine, we were both the people who should know how this stuff works.

I think now that she was shaky technically and given what the job was, she was also likely to react badly to anything she saw as criticism. At the time, I was shaky editorially and while later I got used to her, I think that at this point I was still frightened by her.

All of which is back in my mind so many years later because this week I looked up a publisher’s website and the way it was written reminded me of that moment. The way just a couple of words were written told me that this publisher is not competent technically and in overreacting will loudly blame anyone else for even the smallest, briefest hiccups.

I did then find other issues I’m not keen on, but those were just confirmation. Two words told me not to submit to that publisher.

Just to be clear, and to dramatically delay revealing the two words for a moment – though don’t get excited, they’re not worth the tension I’m trying to build – I have no reason to assume this publisher would want me. The book proposal I have is necessarily on a backburner as other projects take up my time, but I do relish it and I had been told that this publisher might be looking for something like it.

Strictly speaking, no, they’re not. They have a submission window that isn’t open yet. But broadly, yes, I could see my book with them — except it won’t be.

You know that every publisher lists requirements on its website and that a shocking number of writers ignore them. The publisher will say they do, for instance, exclusively children’s text books, and some writer will send them a five-volume encylopedia of horror flash fiction poetry.

But the publisher will also say something that I suppose you could call technical, but it hardly feels enough for that term. They’ll say what format they want the manuscript in — and they’ll always say Microsoft Word. Sometimes they’ll accept PDFs, but they always accept Microsoft Word.

Word is the lingua franca of publishers even as — literally, in two senses of that word — millions of writers have left it for alternatives such as Scrivener and Pages.

Which this publisher clearly knows because the two words were: “Never .pages!!” — complete with the two exclamation marks. Another term for an exclamation mark is a shriek and that’s what this line sounded like to me.

Two words tell me this publisher is not technically competent. The shrieks do a lot of that work, and also make me hesitate about the publisher’s writing style, but then the “.pages” bit does quite a lot. The publisher means a Pages document, but saying its extension instead of its name tells me they don’t know what extensions mean. I guarantee they’re on a PC because there you more often have to remember or think about filename extensions than you do on a Mac, but there’s also just something off with it all.

They sound like they’re using terms without actually understanding them. And I keep saying they, but somehow it makes them sound like a one-man or one-woman band. I’m guessing about that, but it feels like one person and he or she is shaky technically. That still shouldn’t be an issue, yet it also feels as if they’d be exactly as acrimonious about problems as my old colleague.

Again, I’ve no reason to presume this publisher would go for this book idea. But you have to be able to work with a publisher and I’m no more likely to submit to this one than I am — sorry — to tell you which one it is.

Still, as writers, we submit to publishers and there’s a lot of weight on the word submit. Maybe I’m just old enough to now see that it’s a partnership and a collaboration, or maybe it’s just that there are so many little publishers these days that you can be picky.

But it is definitely that what you write will tell people more about you than what your words actually say. And now, of course, I’m looking up the screen wondering what I’ve given away about myself. Ah, it’s only you and me here, and you’re nice, you won’t admit you think I’m still holding a petty grudge against that Word colleague.

If you’re going to forget something, presumably there must be a time when you know it and a time when it’s gone from your head. Surely there must, then, be one day in which this change happens.

I think it’s today.

For I heard a joke a few months ago and I can still remember it, but for the all the chocolate in the world, I could not now tell you the name of the comedian.

Which is of course usually a bad thing, and especially as this means I’m about to rip him off. (I do remember it was a he.) But in this case, I want to give you a bad review of a good joke. For cause.

Follow. Here’s the joke.

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

Okay, so, not earth-shattering, but it’s a good line, it’s a good joke. Except it isn’t. Because as delivered by this comedian, the joke actually went on further: “I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came. Or did he? Was the bell broken?”

Destroyed.

A nice laugh, eradicated by the follow-up.

It is insulting to presume your audience won’t understand something, but there’s also something here about surfacing the work. You don’t show your working out, you don’t show your various drafts, you present the writing, the finished writing. And in this case, the comedian laid bare his thinking. Not enough people will get this joke, he thought, so he’d best explain it and that way everyone will get it.

Yes, certainly, that’s true. Not everyone will get the joke as it stands and if you add in an explanation, there is not one single person who will fail to grasp the gag.

But I offer that there is also now no one whatsoever who will find it funny anymore.

The comedian thinks the choice is between a few people laughing and a lot of people laughing, but it is not. The choice is really between a few people laughing and nobody. A joke is a precious and difficult piece of writing, a prize and a delicacy, and it can be shot to hell if you don’t shut up at the right point.

I heard the comedian tell this joke, I laughed, then he did the follow-up exposition and the laugh rather died in my throat. I was left feeling a bit embarrassed to be even smiling at something that was now deeply obvious instead of surprising, that was now newspaper-headline-plain instead of leaving you just the tiniest thing to work out for yourself.

But the reason this is back in my head this week is that last weekend, I heard another comedian do a joke that was a similar format. It was another one-liner, it depended on you realising what he wasn’t saying, and it was a good gag. And he did not explain it afterwards.

He did something worse.

He waited a beat and then said to the audience, “take your time.”

I stopped watching.

It was obviously that I didn’t enjoy being patronised, but also if you’re really going to give me time to grasp a joke, it had better be a bit better than this. That’s why I stopped: the patronising tone, yes, but also the instant awareness of cockiness, that this was what he thought was brilliant material. Patronising me about my ability to comprehend something –

– wait, I’ve just realised, right now, talking to you, that I cannot remember what the joke was. It was only six days ago and it wasn’t good enough to stick in my head.

Okay, so patronising is rarely a sought after commodity, but in this case it did so much damage in so many ways. It wrecked the joke, of course, but it also put a spotlight on the relationship between this comic and his audience. He seemed to feel superior, yet the joke just wasn’t remotely good enough to support that.

And then since it therefore shone out from him that he thought this was brilliant material, that also told me there was nothing in the rest of his set to stick around for.

Well.

Listen, if we’re going to be made to think about the working-out of a joke, let’s do it usefully, let’s do it together. Take that first joke again:

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came. Or did he? Was the bell broken?”

Obviously we kill that terrible ending, so the joke becomes:

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

Much better. Oddly, I think we do need to say repairman. “Repairer” would be more accurate but in this context that could mean some kind of DIY kit, rather than a man or a woman. I think we’d spend just a moment too long unpicking that word if it were repairer. So “repairman” is wrong, but I think it’s needed.

Whereas “today” isn’t.

“I waited in all day for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

I think that’s where we should stop. But we could do this:

“I waited in all day for the doorbell repairman.”

or

“I waited in for the doorbell repairman.”

That turns the original 21-word joke into 7 words. Oh! We can do it with one fewer: “I waited for the doorbell repairman.”

But now I think that it definitely doesn’t work. It’s become a statement, whereas the 13-word version — the last one to keep “but he never came” — is a story. That seems to me to be the best, it is narratively complete, with a setup and a surprise.

It’s possible that I’m overthinking this.

I know that in the very best scripts I’ve read, in the very best writing I’ve relished, there is always a confidence. There is never a hesitation, there is always a boldness. It doesn’t matter who the writer is, it doesn’t matter what the topic is or even whether I like it, if it’s well written, it’s always somehow declarative. Here it is, there you go.

Granted, hesitant writing tends not to get finished, so you just don’t get to see it. And then of course by the time you do see any writing, it has fought some battles to get to you. At the very least it’s had a skirmish or two in the writer’s head, but then it’s also had to defend itself with publishers and editors. I shouldn’t make that last sound like a fight, my writing has only ever been improved by conversations with editors and producers. But always, there’s a process and the writing gets toughened up along the way, as much as the writer does.

Again, that’s regardless of the writer or the topic. I imagine even the most delicate gauze of a poem faces some bruising between the first idea and the time you or I get to read or hear it.

But sometimes there is a conceit, too.

I’m not going to name the show I watched that put this in my head. Partly because I just cannot insult writers and especially not ones who were more successful than me in every way that I count. I don’t happen to like any of their work but they achieved what I have failed to achieve and what I want so much to achieve. They also did it in this case with a story about time, which is my obsession, so frankly that’s rubbing it in.

Still, if you compare them to me, they win, they must win. They were professionals.

Plus, if I told you what this show was, you might even watch it and I truly see no reason why your day should be spoiled.

To my mind, yes, it is that bad. It was a 1980s piece so like most things it has dated, but I did watch it at the time. According to Wolfram Alpha, I first watched it 13,073 days ago, and I felt the same then as I did last Tuesday when I watched it again. The whole production is risible and if you’ve just asked wolframalpha.com what the date was then, if you’re thinking of using the BBC Genome project to see what aired on BBC1 at 19:35 that day, that’s on you. I take no responsibility.

There is an argument, incidentally, that the writers of a bad show may not be responsible for its dreadfulness, either. Part of the bruising on the way from idea to finished production is that no one outside of it can really ever know how the journey went. Certainly this was a low point in a series that has had quite high peaks before and sheer towering mountains since, so, you know, context is everything.

Yet thirteen thousand days ago, I was half agog and half repelled by what I saw as risible dialogue, amdram writing and pantomime staging. On Tuesday, I was again. But I also saw what I think I missed back in the 1980s: I think I can see now that absurdly, there is an arrogance to the writing, there is a conceit.

The most specific things I can point to are ones where a plot hole is addressed with one character saying something they would never say, that no one would ever say, and sometimes to somebody who already knows. There’s a sense somehow of how that problem is sorted, then, the audience will buy this and we’ve been so clever they’ll never know it was a last-minute repair job.

But there’s also a more nebulous sense throughout that you’re watching the writer, not the show. All writing reveals its writer, but that writer should be focusing on their story, not themselves. So a sense of feeling clever, certainly of patronising the viewer because the writer thinks they know more than the fools who could’ve been watching Coronation Street over on ITV instead, it rankles. And since you are at no point caught up in the story, you have plenty of time to rankle.

This has been bouncing around my head since Tuesday and I haven’t really got anywhere. But I keep coming back to this business that the two writers of this were literally professionals. This was their job and, again, they were more successful than I am, so I can’t deny that they were professional television writers. And yet I’m going to try: I think — I think — to be confident is professional, and to be conceited is amateur.

By chance, incidentally, I read this week that the two writers of this show refused to listen to their script editor since he was young and so had none of their television writing experience.

You don’t have to know how to spell the word faeces in order to recognise shit.

I keep thinking about surprises. I mean in drama and comedy, possibly most of all in television, because there are some surprises that cannot, cannot be surprising, and yet shows rather have to do them anyway, have to pretend they’re startling.

Take the first episode of “Shrinking” by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein, for just one example that put this back in my head today. I checked this again and in a 40-minute pilot episode, it takes just a few seconds under six minutes to get us to a certain key point.

Up to then, we’re seeing Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) have a drunken night, a bad morning, a shattered relationship with his daughter and a clearly increasingly fractious one with his neighbours. At 5’55” into the episode, he walks into a therapy room and — surprise! — he’s not the patient, he’s the therapist.

The way I wrote that to you there, it sounds like I’m criticising the show and I’m not at all. It’s just that this moment is played as a surprise and yet if you have even heard of this TV show, you already knew. The entire series is about a therapist and every promotion for it, every mention of it, begins with that detail.

I suppose in the sea of TV on streaming platforms, you may now be more likely to stumble across something without having seen a trailer before. And “Shrinking” is on Apple TV+ which, while it has some of my absolute favourite shows of the last couple of years, has a very small audience compared to Netflix or Disney+.

And then this stumble-instead-of-trailer way of discovering the show must become yet more likely when “Shrinking” isn’t a new show and instead is a classic.

Except if you go to the series right now, this “surprise” is in your face. “Jimmy, a therapist mourning his wife, takes a more proactive approach with his patients in the hopes that helping them will help himself.”

With that one line, nothing in the opening six minutes is a big surprise, nothing. The detail of what he does, yes, and what happens to him that night and morning, sure, but that it’s happening and why, there isn’t a chance that you have any doubt about what’s behind it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all done very well and you are enviably quickly into the story and the character, but it cannot be surprising.

So then we get to 5’55” and Jimmy, looking a wreck, sits down in front of a man who asks if he’s okay. And after nodding that he’s fine, he’s fine, Jimmy says to this man: “Steven, what’s on your mind today?”

Jimmy is the therapist, smash cut to main titles.

It is played as this big surprise and it cannot ever be that, yet I think it also has to be played exactly this way. The alternative is to take for granted that people have read the blurb, have seen the trailer, and so the episode skips yeah, yeah, right into whatever comes next.

A show has to exist within itself, I mean I think it has to be what it has to be regardless of any promotion or word-of-mouth descriptions. That’s for any show setting up and revealing its core premise, but specifically it’s for “Shrinking”, I think this unsurprising surprise must be the only way that the series can establish itself and what it’s about. This is a show about therapist who’s had a calamitous time, so we need to know he’s a therapist and while it helps to know what’s been so bad, we really just need to know how bad it was.

We need that in order to be prepared, armed. The comedy is going to see and show us what happens next. So we have to have that surprise reveal, it’s the show and the viewer agreeing to start here.

There is an argument that all of this is throwing away what would or could have been a big surprise. But I think it’s more that drama and comedy series have a certain element that is like throwing a surprise party for the viewer — and the viewer has been told about it already.

The show goes through the charade of jumping out at you with balloons, and we unconsciously do the gasp, hand to chest, you got me routine.

I don’t see that there’s any other way.

Although, you can play with it more. I suddenly remember, talking to you this moment, how Alan Plater had a laugh with us in his dramatisation of Stevie Davies’s novel, “The Web of Belonging. Filmed as just “Belonging”, it’s about someone who walks out of a long marriage — and Alan, knowing we knew that was the premise, opened with the person missing. They’re just around the corner, they haven’t left yet and he’s going to get us to the point where they do go, but it was a nod to the audience and to what the audience knows coming in.

I just remembered that. I might go watch that now, thanks.

Just by chance, I recently saw three concerts over about three weeks and it struck me that each one was an example of something I hadn’t realised was important to me. And in perfect dramatic form, one was poor at this thing I care about, one was good, and one was excellent. In that order.

Okay, let me tell you that the last one, the excellent one, was Midge Ure. When I got married, part of the marriage settlement was that my wife took the spelling of my surname, but not my pronunciation. (I say Gallagher with a hard second g, she says it with a soft one.) But in return, I got Midge Ure from her — and not Ultravox, the band he’s best known for.

Okay II, “Vienna” is an Ultravox song and it was remarkable hearing a full Birmingham Symphony Hall audience singing that. I can only imagine what it must feel like to have your own words sung back to you.

Anyway.

The first concert was a short one with a group of singers doing cover versions. A clue that there was a problem came quite early when one singer announced that we would get to hear songs by some of the world’s most credible artists.

That was a three-blink moment for me and in case you’re a couple of blinks behind, she meant “incredible”.

Obviously anyone can mis-speak, yet that word felt like a summary of my problem. I don’t think that singer knew what the word meant and I felt throughout that none of them new what the lyrics they were singing meant, either. A nadir was saying they were going to do a stripped down, minimal version of their favourite, and it turned out to be George Harrison’s “Something” – completely overblown with the lyrics bouncing between three singers to give them each a turn.

You knew the song wasn’t a favourite of theirs, you knew they hadn’t heard it before the show, and you also knew there was no particular reason that they should: I’m rubbish with ages but they were all far, far too young to know The Beatles much. So fine, but telling me that something is a favourite, then rather demonstrating that it wasn’t, felt like a modern-day politician’s lie. Politicians have always lied, but they don’t bother putting any effort into it any more.

These cover singers diminished the music they were covering and one of the effects was that they made it seem like the show was supposed to be about themselves instead of the “credible” artists and their work.

Which I realised more fully when I saw the second concert and it was also a short show made up cover versions, but there it was all about the music. The pianist and singer would enthuse about the writer of the song — consequently winning my heart instantly — and enthuse about the history of the piece and enthuse about the piece itself and repeatedly enthuse about the band he was working with.

He made it that the show was about the music, not remotely about him. And specifically because of that, he was a star on that stage where the previous lot were not.

All of which is trundling through my head at Symphony Hall as Midge Ure played almost entirely his own music. (He did one cover, No Regrets.) Here is the writer, playing what he wrote, and however many hundreds of people were there, they were there to see him and his music. In every sense of the phrase, he was the star of the night.

Except he didn’t act like it and that was damn right.

At one point, he and his band had started a piece when he paused for just the smallest moment and asked the audience: “Ready?” I can’t explain why that was so likeable but I think it was because it was about the audience and it was about the music. It wasn’t “here’s a song I wrote”, it was “here we all are together.”

It’s always the writing and it always the audience that matters. It is never the star.

I am not often shocked by anything, but I was actually appalled to realise two minutes ago that I have missed a tenth anniversary of something that was huge to me. On the zero anniversary, I mean when it was actually happening, I wrote a very long howl about it to you — and I also talked about it at length on radio.

BBC Television Centre closed its doors on March 22, 2013. That’s 10 years, 2 months and 4 days ago. I thought I would be unlikely to get over it, as peculiar as that may sound about a building, but apparently I have.

I’m disappointed in myself. That howl about TVC closing ended with a couple of lines that I was proud of then, I think I’m proud of now:

It is a loss. It wasn’t perfect.

But it was perfect.

It’s just a building. And it wasn’t the first one where I got chucked out before it could be demolished. BBC Pebble Mill went too, and I was — I am — unhappy about that. BBC Woodlands went next, and I’m not that fussed. I can still mentally walk around both of those buildings and I took a lot of photos of the insides of Woodlands before it was turned into the outsides and then flattened.

But TVC is different. Actually, it’s very different because you can still go there. God, you can actually live in Television Centre instead of just working there so much that it felt like you did.

Oh! Maybe it’s the anniversary that made this hit so hard. On February 4 this year, I drove by TVC and for some reason it was acutely more painful than a couple of years ago when I’d been to see a recording of Pointless in the reopened studio part.

Quick aside? At that recording, I asked a security guard something about the renovation of those parts of the building that weren’t demolished. I can’t remember what I asked, and I can’t remember how the topic got on to James Corden, but it did.

I do remember this security guy saying something nice about Corden until I grimaced, said I’d met him once at a work thing and within half a second wished I hadn’t. Boom. All professional politeness was gone and the guard vented about that man. I think I saved him a therapy session.)

I was going to say that this is what was so special about TVC. Bumping into people you wouldn’t otherwise ever meet, getting to talk, getting to share.

But no.

Everything was special about TVC and we have lost it. It wasn’t perfect. But it was perfect.