Derry Girls

Top Ten favourite scripts of 2022

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Previously on Self Distract… I’ve read scripts all my life and I love it, but since late December 2017, I’ve read at least one per day. Once a year I do a personal top ten for no very clear reason, although oddly it wasn’t until I wrote 2021’s list that I realised how thematically connected all ten were.

Anyway. Now, read on.

There’s obviously a week or two left of 2022 and I will continue to read a script every day, but up to this moment, I’ve read 515 during the year. That’s about typical, especially if I’ve been involved in any awards judging and I have again this year.

But otherwise, this has been an unusual year because – so far – 238 of the scripts I read were from the same show. Doctor Who. Chiefly the 1963-1989 version, though I’m only up to 1981, and some scattered reading of the revived series, scattered because I’ve already read those and usually was just going back to re-read good ones.

Speaking of good, as well as counting the scripts I read because that’s obviously vitally important to me for some reason, I do also make an extremely brief note next to each. Good. That word comes up a lot. Of the 238 Doctor Who scripts, a near majority were “good”, though there were some that were “a bit tedious”, others that were “fine” or “okay”.

Then there were five that I noted as being “very good” — and by coincidence, also five that I’ve listed as being “utter shite altogether”. Details on application.

None of the Doctor Who scripts made my personal top ten for the year, although Blink by Steven Moffat might’ve got in if it hadn’t been the fourth time I’d read it.

It’s not like my top 10 is significant, but then for completeness, it’s also definitely not in any way statistically valid. My top 10 for 2022, just for starters, contains only a single script that was actually written in 2022. The rest range across all of recorded history, making the list this year only because I happened to read them in 2022.

So don’t see this as judgement or pontification or anything remotely about me, other than how this is a way I can show you ten pieces of writing I think are brilliant – and include links out to nearly all of them. If you don’t happen to have read them already, I envy you having them ahead of you.

10. Justified: The I of the Storm by Dave Andron (read online on January 16)
9. Battlestar Galactica: Mini-Series by Ronald D. Moore (read part one, part two online on November 20 and 21)
8. Motherland: Pilot by Holly Walsh, Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan, and Helen Linehan read online March 28)
7. My So-Called Life: Dancing in the Dark by Winnie Holzman (read online April 23)
6. Slow Horses: Failure’s Contagious by Will Smith (read December 6)
5. Lou Grant: Nazi by Robert Schlitt (read April 22)
4. Peggy for You by Alan Plater (read January 24, buy from Amazon)
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (read July 10, buy from Amazon)
2. CODA by Sian Heder, based on La Famille Bélier by Victoria Bedos, Thomas Bidegain, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Éric Lartigau (read online February 12)
1. Derry Girls: Season 3 Special: The Agreement by Lisa McGee (read September 29)

Peggy for You and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are stage plays, CODA is a film, and the rest are TV. Thank you to Hat Trick for the Derry Girls script, and Apple TV+ for Slow Horses.

Thanks too, to Charles Martin who got me a lot of 1970s and 1980s Doctor Who scripts. .

And most especially to possibly my favourite site on the internet, TV Writing. Only 20 of this year’s scripts came from there, and I am astonished because it’s usually so many more.

I expect it will be in 2023.

Relax, don’t do it

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I have no clue what you do to relax but that’s fair enough, I don’t have the faintest notion what I do either. Yet for some reason, and who knows why, just lately I’ve been worrying about it. I’ve been conscious that I don’t know how to do this relaxing thing. What with one thing and another, it could be 5am when I start work, then 8pm before I sit down to dinner and I spend the rest of the evening wondering what to do.

I did fall asleep in the bath the other day.

I’m not interested in work/life balance, I don’t see them as two different things because everything I’ve been able to take everything I’ve ever enjoyed and make it be part of my work. Hmm. I am interested in how saying that 5am to 8pm bit sounds simultaneously like a boast and a whinge. Either way, it’s not good, so let me reassure you that the real problem is that I’m getting so little done in that time.

Although this is relaxing me, actually, writing to you right now. You’ve got a look in your eye and I’m warily wondering where you’re going to go with that, but talking like this is definitely relaxing.

Also reading, that’s good. I read a script every day and yesterday’s one was utter bliss. I can’t tell you what it was because I got it through a job I’m doing but it was an 45-minute TV script so, being a fast reader, for about half an hour I wasn’t in my office, I was in Derry in the 1990s.

Just thinking it through, that was also about the 11th hour I’d been in front of a screen yesterday. It’s startling how you can physically be in one place, physically using one Mac, and yet it feels like every hour is completely different. Scriptwriting, video editing, article writing, project management, watching a snippet of TV over a very fast lunch, audio editing, research, and countless conversations over email.

I say countless, the truth is that there isn’t that much, I just don’t count it.

Somehow I also don’t count it as work, nor as relaxation. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea of what the word means. I might ponder that, although some fifteen years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things. To this day I wonder what she really meant.

Maybe I should just relax.