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.

I am at least half a dozen episodes of Star Trek: Picard behind so it is at least possible, if not highly likely, that the show has gone in a way I didn’t expect after watching the trailer.

But deep in the middle of that surprisingly long trailer for the new Picard series, a character says “trust no one.”

Oh, aye, you know what that means. It means don’t trust them, the person saying it. If Star Trek: Picard does not bow to that trope, it means that maybe thrillers have moved on.

Because there are certain things in thrillers that come in to fashion because they were originally surprising and then eventually become unsurprising, become obvious, become risible.

Follow. Previously on “trust no one”, they just meant it. Whoever said it, whichever character they were saying it to, it was serious and true. You could object to how no such character ever follows this up with a list of suspects. And the character who told this never remembers anything about until the shock/obvious revelation later of who is the baddie.

I’m wondering now if there a moment in time where “trust no one” was not true, yet not serious. Because it seems in retrospect that we got very quickly to today’s version where “trust no one” is practically a guarantee that whoever said it is the specific person who should not be trusted.

Audiences are clever. You and I have seen a hundred thousand billion dramas and read at least two books, so we know the significance of tiny details, we know about face value and surprises and reversals and twists.

I once had a mentor who wanted me to change something in a script I was working on. It was a scene in a hotel bedroom and I remember that the way it played, you at first thought that there was a man and a woman about to, er, pass the time. Later you realise much more and I hoped that there would come a moment where you suddenly realised that all of the playful things said between the characters was actually really vicious.

This mentor wanted me to have the guy lose his socks. The mentor was far more experienced than me, so maybe this was the secret of his sock-cess, but what you’re picturing now is how he tried selling it to me. My male character is a klutz and he’s searching the bedroom for a sock while half in and half out of his trousers. If you just pictured him falling over, you’ve got it.

I said no.

If someone who is a better and vastly more experienced writer than you suggests something, you will listen at the very, very least from politeness. But this time, no.

“I’ve seen that before,” I explained.

“You have,” said the mentor, “but the audience hasn’t.”

Bollocks.

Not only has the audience seen that particular situation, they’ve seen every version of it. At this distance and having said to you what the real aim of that scene was, I’m actually quite pleased with myself because for its time, I think I was at least trying to do something a little fresh, a little new.

But it would have to have been for an earlier epoch before the sock story would’ve actually been new.

I like that things move on. I adore when drama respects the audience. But isn’t half a moving target. Trust me.

I’m going to be positive about this: my sense of drama and writing was fully formed by the time I was a teenager. Alternatively, my sense of drama and writing hasn’t evolved since.

But I was watching an old Doctor Who story recently and remembering how I felt when it aired, remembering the feeling as vividly as if it were happening right now. Of course, it was happening right now, I was watching this thing and it was dreadful.

Back in the 1970s or 1980s – I’m not trying to hide my age, just trying to obscure which Doctor Who story I could be talking about – I sat in front of this thing thinking no. No. It had impossible moments like a companion happening to speak an Aboriginal dialect from thousands of years ago and I’ve just given you enough to recognise, know, or be able to find out that I’m talking about Four to Domesday.

Peter Davison is the Doctor, Terence Dudley wrote it. Sorry, Terence.

So anyway, it has moments like that about the dialect, and the same character — Tegan, played by Janet Fielding — being able to fly the TARDIS. On one hand, pop me into a sports car and I’d be lost looking for the ignition. And on the other hand, Tegan gets so frustrated trying to take off that actually it is a glorious piece of heartfelt acting.

But still, it had these impossible moments that so jump out of the screen and slap you that you resent the characters. It had a thing where another companion, Adric is asked to explain E=mc2, and if my first reaction is kill me now, my more considered reaction is kill that script then. It was meant to be Big and Clever and show that Adric is amazing. I’ll bet you anything that out of writer Terence Dudley, actor Matthew Waterhouse and me, I am the only one who’s read the General and Special Theories of Relativity.

It’s the presumption that even so, they know more than the viewer, and that the viewer will be wowed by this pathetic bollocks.

Still.

Anyway.

Breathe.

Back when this aired, fine I thought no, this is poor, this is not serving your characters, it is not telling a story. Fan reviews at the time liked the show much more than I did and to this day, every review I can find manages to praise something in it.

Whereas the me of today is left wondering not just whether I should bother coming back for part 2, but even whether I should pack in this thing of watching the original Doctor Who episodes from the start. I’ve been doing that for 10 months I think, and I know I’ve now seen more than 400 episodes, but maybe it’s time, maybe enough is enough.

But.

Rather than make a positive decision to end this watching marathon and find a kettle, I think I really let Four to Domesday’s episodes play on back to back with decreasing attention from me, and increasing pressure from my hands cradling my head.

But I’m glad it did run on because the next story is Kinda by Christopher Bailey.

Doctor Who may never have looked cheaper than it did in Kinda and that is truly, truly saying something. What’s supposed to be a lush jungle is filmed in a garden centre’s display corner. There’s some poor business at the start and end with Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) being incapacitated for no reason other than to cut down the number of characters in the show.

I’m not complaining. There were too many companions at the time and for a brief moment when Nyssa’s collapse was a cliffhanger, there was actually speculation that the character was pregnant. That would’ve been a story. But no, she collapses from early onset technobabble and it takes just under four episodes for her recover and never speak of it again.

So that was risible and if I’ve mentioned the cheapness, I haven’t conveyed it enough to you. No, cheaper than that.

At the very time it was broadcast, Kinda wasn’t exactly dismissed, but other stories easily beat it in popularity polls that year. Then shortly after it aired, Kinda was in fact dismissed, was actually derided, and its most apparently cheap moments were mocked. This period lasted a long time in part because, true, there is a lot to mock.

Except.

I adored it at the time. Yes, if you know the story then you know what I’m alluding to when I say yes, yes, that thing at the end, I know, I know, it is impossible to watch without thinking The Muppet Show had a better budget.

But by the time we reach this thing at the end, we’ve got there with such characters, such ideas and – be still my beating hearts – such dialogue. By that last episode, I am totally in this story and I am enthralled.

And I still am.

Kinda is my favourite of the more than 400 Doctor Who episodes I’ve seen so far.

There is a bit of me that would adore seeing Kinda redone as a modern production, complete with location filming and a better thing-at-the-end. But characters and dialogue beat everything.

They always do.

I have a ferociously sore thumb and I have to tell you that because despite all claims to the contrary, you wouldn’t notice, you couldn’t tell, since it does not stick out.

But it’s funny I should use the word “stick”. I got this pain because I have been holding a pencil, really a stylus, and handwriting on a device called a Note Air2. I’m reviewing it, actually I’m mostly liking it a great deal, but I also had a Secret Plan.

I was going to handwrite my next novel.

All of it.

I’ve friends who handwrite their first drafts of anything, then type them up later. Usually I figure I don’t have the time, and besides, I like typing, I think through the keyboard. But I see their point about it being just you, the pen and the paper, or in this case a screen.

I see the point about how the paper isn’t going to interrupt you with a notification. And I very, very much see the point about how when you type it up later, you are not just copy typing, you are already editing and changing and improving the work. You’re already taking it from a first draft to a, I don’t know, draft 1.5. Or at least 1.2. Something like that.

So.

I’ve been mithered over a novel for months. I wrote a 100,000-word one over COVID and then threw the lot away immediately afterwards because it was, in technical terms, utter shite altogether.

Since then I’ve tried salvaging the one decent paragraph and the one half-good joke from it, but that’s gone nowhere. And then a couple of weeks ago, practically minutes before this review Note Air2 arrived at my door, I had a new idea. Totally new novel.

So. I’ve got the idea, I’ve got this thing, I’m also going to be away on one of those there holiday things I’ve read about all my life, I felt sure that this was it, this was my time.

I handwrote about 50 words last night. It wasn’t even the novel, wasn’t even some notes about the novel, it was purely and solely playing with the Note Air2 to see how it worked. To see how you handwrite on it, most definitely how you erase your rubbish, and then things like how you set it to lined paper, and then no, narrower lines than that, please.

Plus.

This thing has a handwriting recognition feature. That alone is enough to make me crack knuckles and say good luck to it, but actually, give this thing some credit. This device was better able to read my handwriting than I was.

So I considered all of this a giant success, but since I was in bed, since it was late, I thought that was enough so I swiped away from what I was writing and instead got back to reading Crime and Punishment on the same device.

It’s not the laugh-a-minute thrill ride musical I’d been expected, but still it’s good, I read on far too late, I consequently slept in far too long, and I have had a throbbing sore thumb all day.

I thought it was RSI. Until I found it eased when I typed, and when I picked up that stylus to handwrite the words CHAPTER ONE, I yelped in pain.

So.

I have handwriting no human being can read, including me. I type something like eight times faster than I can scrawl by hand. And it is physically painful for me to handwrite.

It’s not as if I think the world will weep, but I’d like to be able to hand write more. And for some reason, this novel feels locked into handwriting. I don’t know why that could be and really I only thought it right now, talking to you, but it is.

I’ve evolved away from the need for pens, but I miss them. I need to break out of this. Or at least not spend a whole holiday going ow, ow, ouch.

I had this thing recently where a stranger asked me about their writing. I like this: if there’s something you think I might know the answer to, I’m flattered that you asked. Plus, face it, I’m a man: if it turns out that I know the answer, too, that’s made my day.

In this case, I knew the answer.

What he asked was about how to start writing and in particular, how to choose a word processor, a text editor, a system, an app, a lot of apps. He had Apple’s Pages word processor, I think he had a dozen other things, plus there is a huge amount going on in the guy’s life.

Did I know what he ought to do?

Yes.

“Open Pages again and start writing,” I told him. Forget everything else, all the apps and tools, because you can come to them later: remember that I’ve been doing this for thirty years so while I enthuse about a huge number of apps and tools, I found each one as I came to need them. Technology is a boon, but it isn’t a shortcut, writing is always and forever one word after another.”

He hasn’t replied and I’m not sure I expect he ever will because for all my best intentions, I think my answer there reads a bit snotty. Sorry, Matthew.

But it’s a rare case where I know that I am right. You can argue about Pages, and I only picked that because he mentioned it, but the thing is to I get on with that or Word or anything, to get on with it and this one-word-after-another is always the answer.

Admittedly I have to keep telling myself that too, but it’s true.

True and a bit boring. No wonder he hasn’t replied.

I’m doing this thing at the moment where I actually count the number of words I write each week. I promise that it’s for a good reason, it’s for a good purpose.

Okay, I can’t leave it at that, it sounds so suspicious. My 58keys YouTube channel now has a Patreon thing and one element of that is a weekly email to subscribers called “Fess Up and Press On Friday”. The stated aim is that I will tell you what I have written and — more importantly — what I haven’t written this week, plus what I promise to write in the next seven days.

I say that, then Patreon subscribers can — and I love this, do — attest to what they’ve done, not done, and are going to do. I think it keeps us going, I know that so far I am quite encouraged when I come to look at what I’ve done.

Also obviously very discouraged when another week goes by and I haven’t got any further with this script or with that novel.

But on average so far, I’ve been writing around 17,000 words per week, with practically all of them published. That’s going to go down shortly, I can see this is a busy period, but given that I don’t know how much you write, I can tell myself that this is a good amount and so feel, well, good.

I want to also say that I have automated a lot of this, although in another way I ant to not say that to your face at all. It’s Occam’s razor: am I anal for counting every word or anoraksic for having my Mac do most of the counting? Let me get back to the point.

Which is that I said most of that word count is published. The small bit that isn’t, or at least isn’t yet, is the killer.

If the current level kept up to the end of this year, I would have written and published something around 800,000 words and since I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m certainly a few million published words in.

Yet it’s this unpublished sliver that I think about. There’s this certain type of writing I want to get into and maybe this is on my mind today because I’ve just an extremely praising rejection to do with it, but it is all feeling impenetrable.

I know I’m wrong, I know that this is just like any other form of publishing or producing, writers are needed and unless this rejection was entirely bollocks, I am capable of doing it.

But it does feel sometimes like all I can do is count words. Mind you, I’m not sure there is ever anything else. All writing is one word after another.

And so if I’m not getting where I want to be, if I am not achieving what I want, the answer is that it’s entirely on me and I should pull my finger out. So just as in Fess Up, I’ll make a vow to you: I will write more of this thing I want to do.

You and I can always write more. And that is always the answer.

I don’t think it matters what gets you into something. For instance, I may not be a classical music buff but I am deeply fond of Mahler’s Fifth and I can trace that back to Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson.

You may know it better as Somewhere in Time, the film version which Matheson also wrote, and which starred Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve. For the film, Mahler was out and for some reason Rachmaninoff was in.

Okay.

I have to be in just the right mood for the film version — though plenty of other people will always love it, and some of them dress up in costumes at the filming location every year.

Right mood or not, film or book, I will always and forever be impressed with how Matheson pulls off the meeting between Richard and Elise. I suppose now it’s a meet-cute, but in the 1970s when the book was written and the – I think – 1980s when the film was made, it was just really clever. A hat’s off moment.

Anyway.

The book has a ferocity to it that the film, for all its charm, does not. Richard is ill and there’s a frenzied delirium on the page that’s so compelling. It feels like Rachmaninoff’s little Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is too light for the book.

So I listened to some Mahler after so enjoying the book. Some years later when I left a magazine to go freelance, I was given a CD of his First and Firth Symphonies. I think it was by a Polish orchestra, I’m not sure anymore.

But I am sure that the very next day, my first-ever day as a self-employed writer in my home office, I put that CD on.

Instantly, the phone rang. For some reason, though, I didn’t stop the CD, I just turned the volume down, down, so low down that it might as well have been off. But since it wasn’t, it of course carried on playing.

And carried on. And carried on.

For that entire first day of freelance life, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony played on a barely audible loop, working its way into my head and – actually – leaving me miserable. At this distance I’ve forgotten the details of the day so maybe I was just becoming conscious of what a big step I’d taken leaving a magazine and a salary.

But I think it was the music.

The other day, I had to write about the launch of Apple Music Classical, so naturally I listened to it. So naturally I listened to Mahler’s Fifth first.

Fifth first. There’s something wrong with that sentence.

The thing about Apple Music Classical is that it’s supposed to be incredibly good at helping you find what classical music you want. I believe that’s true, you can search by what instruments you like, you can search by record label recording number, and everything in between. But you have to know something and apparently “Mahler Poland” isn’t enough to get back that old CD.

So naturally, since I live in Birmingham in England, I listened to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The world-class CBSO.

And at moments this music was exultant, and at moments this music scuttled me.

I was standing in my kitchen, cooking, and shocked how miserable I got. It was wonderful.