Doctor Who

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.

Ten seconds and one hundred years of the BBC

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Some time in the 1980s, I was working on the BBC Radio WM breakfast show and there must’ve been some news thing going on about Doctor Who. I can’t remember what it was, but I can very clearly picture me in what was called Area 3 at BBC Pebble Mill, working the phones – and at about 07:00 phoning Doctor Who writer Johnny Byrne to get his reaction.

His reaction was that he had been asleep and was extremely unhappy at me for waking him. And I think that actually ended the conversation we’d been slowly having through letters after I’d written to him enthusing about his script for The Keeper of Traken.

(Just as an aside, I finally got to read that Doctor Who script of his in August. This year. Specifically August 26, 2022, where episode 1 was the 335th script I’d read this year. And August 26 is 41 years, 6 months and 26 days after the show aired. It took me 15,182 days to get to read the script whose finished show I’d so enjoyed. And I have got to stop using WolframAlpha to tell me these things.)

Anyway.

On Tuesday this week, I was called up by BBC Radio Leicester and BBC CWR to talk about the 100 years of the BBC. I was better on the Leicester one, but what strikes me is that this BBC phone interview was at about 07:30. It was arranged in advance, plus I’d been up working for hours anyway, yet still I had this moment of quantum-entanglement-like connection with distant me phoning Johnny Bryne all those years ago.

And to me, the real answer about the best moments of the BBC’s 100 years, was in the moments before I went on air. I’m prepared, I believe I’m professional, and I like how I will have been listening to the show for an hour beforehand and so can pick up on related points. But when I’m on the line waiting, I can also feel the atmosphere that’s in the studio and in whatever their equivalent of Area 3 is.

You know when you work in local radio that it’s not national, it’s not global, and it is transitory. Yet you also feel that it is important, even if it’s only that it’s important to you. I got my lifetime belief that the show comes first from working in local radio, I got my whole sense of time as something to fill and use with pace and rhythm from it, to this day I think about the top and the bottom of the hour because of radio. I cared about that work so overwhelmingly much that there could be no other thought about no other thing while you were doing it.

In the seconds talking with a producer before she put me to air, in those ten seconds, I could hear the exact same care in her voice. I recognise what she’s asking me about is really her checking sound levels, listening for the line quality and being sure I’m not a nutter, I recognise the procedure but more than that, I recognise the atmosphere of the entire studio.

I can point out that today the BBC bows to political pressure like its being bullied in a schoolyard. I can despair at how it always reports strikes by focusing on disruption instead of the desperation that strikers have been driven to. And I could cry about the whole thing of artificial balance, where the BBC won’t have an economics expert say Brexit is going to be bad without then giving equal time and weight to a tosser lying that it will be great.

But those few seconds before I was on air talking about how great the BBC truly has been over the last century, those few seconds reminded me of exactly why the BBC truly has been great.

My contribution to the BBC is barely a single pixel in that century, but the BBC’s contribution to me is life changing.

It’s sobering to now be someone being phoned by BBC Local Radio instead of being one of the people doing the phoning. It’s sobering because I don’t know how that happened, it feels like I was just there making those calls a few days ago, and I think that maybe I miss the me from those years ago. Not sure. I don’t want to go back, but for a brief instant to be handed a slice of what used to be, and to somehow get to represent the whole BBC for one moment, was special.

The waking ally

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So lately I’ve been watching Doctor Who from the start and earlier this week I got to a 1964 episode called The Waking Ally. I’ve seen it now and I cannot figure out who the waking ally is. So very, very foolishly, I looked it up.

It’s days later and I’ve spent a ludicrous amount of time delving into Doctor Who trivia. And as a consequence, I’m experiencing what I can only describe as double-decker nostalgia. Two layers of nostalgia. I’m apparently nostalgic for a moment when I was nostalgic.

For in October 1964, around the time of this episode I’ve just watched, the cast and crew of Doctor Who had a party in the Bridge Lounge at BBC Television Centre. They were there to celebrate having made 50 episodes.

And thirty years later, I was there too.

It’s not as if I stood there, too scared to mingle, too young and timid to interrupt Verity Lambert talking with William Hartnell. But it felt like that’s what I was doing. Just for a few minutes, I sat on the side of a table in that room, quite possibly where they had sandwiches three decades before me, and I listened closely to nobody’s conversation, I heard nobody give a speech.

And now, today, there’s no Bridge Lounge.

It’s gone in the sense that this part of BBC Television Centre has been demolished, but scarily also in the sense that I couldn’t remember quite where it was. I used to walk by it every evening I worked there, every time I headed for the restaurants. But I have a 1950s architect’s sketch of the building and I’ve been staring at it, completely unable to identify the Bridge Lounge.

Brilliantly, however, Google Maps documented the building before it was demolished and I’ve just been using that to walk around this deeply beloved place. And despite not remembering where the Lounge was, not being able to pinpoint it on a map, “walking” through the building, I went straight there.

It even looked as if I met me coming back.

TVC in Google Maps has ghosts like that figure all over the place, but frustratingly, it isn’t complete. In this case, it stops just short of where I want to go now, where I went before. It takes me up to the bridge part and there’s a sign over the entry saying Bridge Lounge, but it won’t let me go further along that part or then left into the room itself.

But zooming along up to that point, racing faster as I realised that I was right about where to go, I could taste the air in that corridor.

I’m nostalgic for the atmosphere you can’t see, for a party I was thirty years too late for, and in a building that no longer exists.

I still don’t know who the waking ally is, but I’m grateful for the journey he or she has sent me on.

Why I left Radio Times

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I left Radio Times because they threw me out. Er, the end.

Okay, no, I say this to you and even one entire decade after I was chucked out of the Radio Times website and magazine, I want to explain that it was a budget thing. Some number of people had to go and it was so obvious that I was expendable at this particular point that I’d packed my bags at the start of the entire interview-for-your-own-job process.

That was the only bit I disliked and I’d actually forgotten it until I said that to you. Much as I loved Radio Times, that was telling me to take a typing test and that bit did piss me off. Even so, I’m not kidding: I knew immediately who would be kept on and who wouldn’t, and that was not from some fatalistic brilliance of mine, it was because it was that obvious.

Again you remind me of something. I say all of this to you and abruptly I can picture the room I was in when they told me. Mind you, this is also no startling feat on my part because the room was in the BBC Media Village and was one of the ones that had been decorated in the style of a BBC show. I was fired from Radio Times in the Doctor Who room. In fact, I’m a tiny bit unclear right now who the two people in front of me were, possibly three, but I am rock-solid clear about how I was sitting with my back to the TARDIS.

Which, if you discount the little detail that I was chucked out, is really why I left.

The actual ten-year anniversary is sometime in the middle of 2022, I’d have to figure it out to know when exactly, but it’s on my mind now because this week a colleague mentioned “The Writer’s Tale”, a book about the making of Doctor Who which I’d read before the aforementioned chucking out.

It is a very, very good book and was the idea of a Radio Times writer I don’t think I even ever met. Benjamin Cook. He asked Russell T Davies to email him about making Doctor Who and the result is – wait, let me check Amazon UK – 704 pages of immense detail. I expect it’s the same length on Amazon US.

Immense detail doesn’t cover it, oddly enough. This book is an oppressive whirlwind of pressures, even as it somehow manages to be joyous at exactly the same time. I remember reading it at night, unable to stop hours after my body was ordering me to sleep, and feeling this same intensity you get from nightmares.

God, it’s a great book.

But this Writers’ Guild colleague mentions it and that’s what put me back ten years or so, put me back in the Radio Times newsroom office like it was, well, not yesterday but no further back than Tuesday at the absolute most.

I can close my eyes and take you around that entire huge, open-plan space. I can point out where I usually sat. I can see in slow motion the moment when I once stood up and saw two identically-dressed people at opposite ends of the newsroom. And consequently realised at last that this is why I’d sometimes have a great chat with her and sometimes she’d blank me like a stranger.

Less embarrassingly and far more fascinatingly, to me anyway, is how I can also picture the precise angle from my usual seat where the office segued into the kitchen. Happy, cheery people would walk by on their way to get tea and at the same exact spot, once or twice they’d turn blood-angry. Like they’d been asked to take a typing test. Real anger, contained only by a desire to keep their job, and then at this moment no longer contained at all.

Always that same spot, always as they passed by me at this same angle.

I suddenly wonder if they just didn’t like me.

Anyway.

Last one. I can also picture-remember the different spot I happened to be sitting in when I was sneaking a few minutes to carry on reading “The Writer’s Tale”.

Again, sorry, fuzzy on the detail. This was some time before 2012, could even have been as far back as 2008 when the first edition of the book came out.

Whenever it was, the moment is vivid for me, the very feel of the paperback in my hand and the pages under my fingers, right here in my head like there’d been a flashbulb. All because of one moment in one of the email exchanges I was reading. Benjamin Cook had asked Russell T Davies about some particular decision in the making of Doctor Who and he’d replied with the answer. I want to say it was to do with casting, but forgive me, my flashbulb memory clearly has some limits.

The key thing, though, is that this was an email conversation. You’ve had a few of those yourself. So you know that every single one, every single exchange in the entire book comes with a date and time stamp. The day, the hour, the minute, that the email was sent.

And that’s why I left.

Because I was fascinated to read about this decision chiefly since I vividly remembered writing a news story for the Radio Times website about precisely that.

Only, I wrote the news story pretty much exactly one year after that email exchange.

I looked up from that page and for the first time, I was no longer where I wanted to be.

I now wanted to be making the decision, not writing about it a year later.

The end.

Okay, no. It should be the end. That would be the right dramatic ending: I look up, realise I don’t belong there anymore, and I get out. Instead, I take a couple of years to leave and I’m very much afraid that I might still be there if they hadn’t shown me a door and which exact side of it they wanted me on.

But really I was gone that day back reading the Doctor Who book. Maybe that was why it seemed so clear to me that it was right to chuck me out. I wish now that I’d left years before, but then I also wouldn’t wish away any of the time I spent there. So I wish instead that those years had been more compressed, exactly the way the decade since has.

Time series

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Tell me you do this too, look serious and say it isn’t just me. I measure the passage of time by TV series. I don’t mean to say that you and I should meet for a coffee at a quarter past “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or on July “24”.

I mean Buffy lasted for seven years. Thriller “24” ran for eight years in its original run. The remake of “Hawaii Five-O” has just ended after a decade. It’s not even as if I followed these shows –– I like Buffy and 24 a lot but didn’t stick with either, I didn’t like Hawaii but the remade theme was fantastic –– yet I am conscious that they came and they went. I talked about “Hawaii Five-O” in my 2005-2010 podcast UK DVD Review and since then, I’ve talked more and they made 240 episodes.

Then “Doctor Who” is heading very close to its 60th anniversary and I remember vividly running across Birmingham because I’d booked the wrong cinema to see its 50th special. Realising that there were two Odeon cinemas and I was not in the most right one, feeling the skin on my lungs as I ran across the city, that was ten minutes ago, not most of a decade.

And speaking of most of a decade, the reason I am thinking of all this yet again now is that “Leverage” ended in 2012 after five years. It’s back today, after what WolframAlpha.com tells me is 3,118 days. What in the world have I done in the last 8 years, 6 months and 14 days? Well, I’ve watched “Leverage” again, I can tell you that.

Otherwise, television drama comes and goes, time ticks on. I think of the immense effort that goes into creating a series and keeping it going for years, and then I think about how quickly that is gone. One moment “Leverage” is a series on US television, the next it was a series on US television.

And now it’s again a series on US television, albeit now called “Leverage: Redemption”. I don’t know when I’ll get to see it here in the UK, but I do know that however successful it is, however many years it runs, it is going to be over astonishingly fast, before I get around to doing anything.

Now we’ve moved from broadcast television to streaming, I don’t get the same thing of seeing a pilot episode one day and hearing the series finale is on ten minutes later. But I do get the discovery that while I was looking away, entire series have come and gone. The other week I came across the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship”, for instance. I’d not heard one syllable about this show but it turns out to have run very successfully for five years.

Five years of work and I missed it. But can now watch it anyway, which is what I’m doing while I wait for “Leverage: Redemption” to come to the UK.

We get so little time. I think people who funnel that time into television drama pull off a gigantic feat and I think they make something that lives and lasts beyond its time. In this case, so much so that demand brings it back for another go.

I think you and I should make some television. Waddya say?

Missing Holby City

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I already miss the BBC’s now-cancelled Holby City show, but chiefly in the way I’ve been missing this hospital series each week for two decades. It’s a soap and those just don’t hold me, so I’m not a viewer, I’ve no concern about it being ended so abruptly. I have a lot of concern for its writers, and all its cast and crew, but – sorry – I’m not going to notice when it’s over.

Except I do feel I owe it something.

Holby City is not the cause of my realising it’s better to write television drama than it ever is to write about television drama, but it was one key pixel in that realisation because of what happened at its launch, some 22 years ago now.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but back then the BBC had gutted one floor of its office building in Elstree and turned it into this Holby City hospital. It was slightly surreal, I was used to going up in that lift and stepping out to see various people in their various offices, now you step out into a ward. I remember being very impressed with the thoroughness of it all, with how it was immediately obvious you could shoot from any angle you needed and there would be little or no time lost setting up anything.

What I don’t remember is how it was lit. I’m sitting here, talking to you, fully able to walk around that set in my head but not able to make myself look up to its ceiling. I don’t remember noticing a ceiling full of lights, but I may just have not noticed.

I will have been impressed by the set and to this day I remain impressed by set designers and dressers. I will also have been impressed by the ten or so other media journalists I was with, though in that case I’m not still impressed. Inside of twenty minutes, I felt I’d gone native: I was rooting for these television drama people and I was embarrassed by the journalists.

Sometimes you pick sides, sometimes the sides pick you.

So there I was – nuts, I can’t remember if I were there on behalf of BBC Ceefax, BBC News Online, or Radio Times. It was one of them, anyway, and we were shown around the ward, then seated for the group interviews.

Ten journalists or so, seated in a semi-circle on the ward, with each main actor being popped down in front of us in turn.

What I most clearly recall is George Irving, who played a grumpy surgeon on the show when it started. First journalist asks: “Did you ever want to be a surgeon in real life?” He gives them a nice quote, saying no, but talking about how inspiring surgeons are.

Next journalist: “when you were a child, did you dream of being a surgeon?” He found some different way to answer.

Third journalist: “Would you have liked to be a surgeon?”

Then it was me and I do remain proud of this. I asked him whether he felt it was going to be hard sustaining his curmudgeonly character over a long series and without it becoming repetitive. Of course he said no, but what I can picture now is how he uncrossed his legs, sat forward, visibly thought about his answer, and told me something of his process and a hint of how they had plans for the character.

Fifth journalist: “When a child you were, a surgeon did you want to be?”

He sits back, re-crosses his legs, gives a quote about how inspiring surgeons are. I’m sure it was hard for each actor to sit there in their turn, facing all these faces, but I’m equally sure that they didn’t need to think hard about their answers, most of the time.

For I want to tell you that nine of the ten of us asked about bloody surgeons and I’m pretty sure I’m right. But I can’t come up with another five variations on that question.

There was another actor who got nine identikit questions from everyone and I know that’s everyone except me, but I can’t remember what I asked her. What I know is that because she was a woman, her questions were all about her relationship with someone. Apparently everyone knew she’d just broken up with somebody or other and that was crucial to the coverage of this new soap.

For some reason, and truly who knows why, I got to do a separate interview with her afterwards. That might be why I don’t remember my question in the semi-circle, I may not have got to ask anything there because it had been arranged that I would get ten minutes with her afterwards. Cannot remember why. Completely blanked. Come on, it’s near as dammit a quarter of a century ago.

But I can still see her to my left as we walked away from that semi-circle and over to a quiet part of the set. I’m not sure how I phrased it, but on the way I know I basically said that I hoped she was okay after this apparently incredible break up but –– I don’t think I said this rudely –– I wasn’t interested. I was interested in the show, in the character, in the drama. Wasn’t sure why the others were so obsessed.

“I know, right?” she exploded. It was deeply flattering, like what I’d said was a pinprick that burst a balloon and she now knew she could say what she really thought. “Who the fuck cares about my break up?” she said. I couldn’t now tell you anything else she said in the actual interview, I haven’t a clue what I wrote, but I liked her hugely and you would too.

You’ve noticed that I haven’t said her name, though. I’ve just got an odd sense that saying it would be bringing up the relationship, whatever it was, or that she might not appreciate my quoting an off the record remark. All these years later, I cannot tell you an off the record remark and who said it. I’m clearly being professional and it is not that for some reason today I’ve I’ve entirely forgotten her name.

I could look it up, I know I’d find her quickly. But then I could probably look up what I wrote and I don’t want to go there. I may still do a lot of feature writing on different topics, and I may even still do some media writing, but I’m not who I was back in, er, 1999 or whenever.

And that day on the Holby City sets was part of changing me, of making me choose a side. Which is why, if I weren’t already, I was then often on the wrong side of moods at places like Radio Times. Much as I loved RT, there would so often be times at RT and at BBC News Online when people there were frustrated that they weren’t being told something key about a new drama.

Whereas I would be right there in the same spot saying no, don’t tell me anything, hide things, lie to me, do whatever you can to make the drama surprising and compelling. I did then and do now despise soap magazines that splash headlines like “Shock Pregnancy” or “I killed him!” before those things happen in their shows. The magazines are told this stuff in advance, knowing it will be featured, because it’s believed that it builds excitement for the show and I think it does the opposite. You don’t have to watch anymore, so you don’t.

I said soaps can’t seem to hold me but there was a trial in Coronation Street once. Big thing, national interest, I want to say Deirdre Barlow. Not sure. But even though I don’t follow that soap, like millions of other people, I was drawn in to watching it because of this story of an innocent woman on trial over some false accusation. Until the producers said publicly that they would never let an innocent character go to prison.

Oh.

Screw that, then, what’s on the other channel?

That was another pixel in the picture, I realise now. It wasn’t one where I was on the side of the show, but was where I knew very clearly what drama meant to me and how revealing something early destroys it. It was one where I had very clear and strong drama opinions. It was also where I found again that there is this difference between soap and drama, plus which side of that I wanted to be on.

But at risk of going further away from Holby City, I’ve also realised that I can vividly see the real moment when I knew where my heart lives. Again, I should be able to work out the date really easily and I daren’t, but what I see when I close my eyes is where I was sitting in a BBC newsroom, this time definitely working for Radio Times.

I can see all the people around me, all the equipment, I can hear the sound of that huge room and feel that chair I was sitting in. And I can see the book I’m reading. The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook – who was a Radio Times writer too – which was about the making of Doctor Who.

The book is a quite an incredibly intense read which, in its first edition, included scripts and drafts of scripts from the series. (Which reminds me: I’ve now read 1,928 scripts in my at-least-one-per-day lark. I should re-read some Doctor Who ones.)

But the majority of the book is an email conversation between its two authors. Which means every few paragraphs, you get a typical email heading with the subject –– plus the date and time.

I’m reading the book and there’s a bit I recognise. Some big decision being made about a particular character in the show and I was actually pleased in that moment, because I remembered writing about that decision for RadioTimes.com.

And then I noticed the date on the email.

Whatever it was, I knew immediately that it was pretty much precisely one year before I’d written my breaking news story about it on Radio Times.

And that’s when I knew. I’m not there yet, not even all these years later, but in that moment I knew I wanted to be making the drama decisions instead of writing about them an entire year after the fact.

Of course it helps that Radio Times, BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online later chucked me out but even if they hadn’t, I’d started down a road that would’ve seen me leave anyway.

And yes, it’s chiefly because of Doctor Who and that one single email.

But it’s also because of Holby City and my one single day on that show’s sets. I won’t miss the show as a viewer because I simply never got into watching it, but I do owe it something.

Dear boy

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On the left there, a somewhat poorly-scanned page from Alan Plater’s screenplay of Fortunes of War, based on Olivia Manning’s novels. On the right, a page from my Doctor Who script, Spaceport Fear. I am shocked to realise that 25 years separate the two, but what joins them is who said these first words of the characters. Prince Yakimov on the left and Elder Bones on the right were both played by Ronald Pickup, who died this week.

I’m a bit numb about that. It’s not like I knew him well and considering that he’s had the most astonishingly long and varied career, it’s a bit bad that I inescapably associate him and that fantastic voice of his with these two roles.

But Fortunes of War means the world to me. I can sit here, talking to you, and play pretty much the entire serial in my head, frame by frame. If you don’t know it, I’d say I envy you having it to enjoy, except that it’s quite hard to find now. Search YouTube for Fortunes of War, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. That’ll do you.

And you can always buy Doctor Who: Spaceport Fear to listen to.

Only, if the name Ronald Pickup makes me instantly picture Prince Yakimov saying “dear boy” in that voice, when I close my eyes I’m walking into the Big Finish studio where that Doctor Who is being recorded – and I’m trying to place the voice of whoever is playing Elder Bones.

I don’t remember why I didn’t already know who all the cast were. I certainly knew that Colin Baker was the Doctor and I was excited at the prospect of seeing Bonnie Langford perform my lines as Mel. I suspect that something changed, that I hadn’t been due to go to the studio and suddenly I could. Oftentimes you don’t go because you’re off writing something else, but whatever the reason, whenever the chance, it is gorgeous to hear first-class actors delivering your lines.

So I’m walking into the control room, I’m hearing that voice, and I’m also absorbing the news that Bonnie Langford isn’t there. I didn’t meet her, I’ve still not met her, and on that day her lines were read in by another member of the cast. Read in so well that I doubted the news, I was so sure that this was Mel talking to whichever man had that great voice. (Langford couldn’t make that recording day so she came in a week later, I believe it was, and recorded all her lines in one go then. I thought that must sound awful, but listen to the story: you cannot tell she isn’t reacting to everyone around her. It’s a remarkable job by everybody from Langford herself to director Barnaby Edwards and the whole crew.)

Anyway.

I was obviously late because they were all deep into recording. And the way the studio is laid out, I could see Colin Baker very easily, but some of the others were completely out of view. So I had this glorious voice filling the control room as if coming from nowhere. I know I know it, I know I recognise it, but it was a good twenty minutes before there was a recording break and I got to see that, yes, it really was Ronald Pickup.

In that twenty minutes, I went from wondering who the voice was, to wondering whether that was really Mel talking to him, and through the stages of mentally comparing what they were all saying to what I’d written. And then so very quickly into forgetting it was all my words, all my story, and just completely believing that this was the Doctor and Mel in some serious trouble.

Big Finish always gets superb casts so I freely admit that I’ve been starstruck at regular intervals. But for half an hour or so over lunch that day, I got to natter away about Alan Plater and Fortunes of War with Prince Yakimov.

Dear boy.

 

 

Times and Spaces

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I have a ridiculously good memory for places. I can boast about this to you because it is of no earthly value. Well, recently it helped me remember where a specific shot was in some video footage that I needed, so that’s nice. But for you, useless. I can’t direct you to a place, I can just know what it looked like.

It’s how I can close my eyes and take a walk around BBC Television Centre, or BBC Pebble Mill, or BBC Woodlands. Now I think of it, nearly every BBC building I’ve ever worked in has been demolished.

Well.

Okay, an equally useless example for you, but one that made me happy. The other night, I was watching a 1973 episode of Columbo called A Stitch in Crime by Shirl Hendryx. And I recognised a place. More than a place, I recognised a specific camera shot of the place. Recognised it and knew where I knew it from.

Columbo
Six Million Dollar Man

On the top, Columbo in 1973. On the bottom, a still from the title sequence of 1976’s The Six Million Dollar Man. Tell me you’re not impressed. Don’t tell me that this is pointless and useless, tell me you’re not impressed.

But this ability to precisely recall shots and angles and places is frustrating me this week. I do this quite often, but for many reasons I have this week been trying to remember exactly where there is not a coffee shop in Birmingham New Street Station. Not a coffee shop.

I could make a crack about how the place is now wall to wall coffee establishments, and of course just like you I could make a comment about long it has been since any of us have been out for coffee.

But the thing with this particular precise and impossible memory is that the coffee shop I’m thinking of used to be there. It was there before New Street was so radically transformed that the very bones of its geography seem different. I can see every step of what was its nearest entrance, I can see the shop – it was a freestanding stall with seats, really – and I can actually see a lot more.

I can see the specific seat and table I sat at. I can see the man I sat with and even the case by his left foot.

But while I do regularly try, I can’t map that precise memory onto where it would have been in the new Birmingham New Street.

And I really do try. Because for all the BBC places, all the magazines and all the websites, and the fact that at the time I was doing Doctor Who radio dramas and my first book was an inch away from coming out, a conversation I had there in 2012 is the most important one in my writing career.

It was a horrible time, actually. While I’ve been a full time freelance writer since the mid-1990s, from about 1999 to 2012, I’d been increasingly working for different parts of the BBC. It was always different parts, different departments across BBC News, the Corporation in general and BBC Worldwide, the commercial side of the BBC. Even within these, there would be variation. So I wrote a lot for Radio Times magazine, but I separately wrote a lot for the Radio Times website.

And in one of the BBC’s many times when it has to be seen to be saving money, I lost that freelance Radio Times website work but you couldn’t tell because they put me on staff instead. Only for one, two, four days a week at different times, but officially I was staff for that site. And still freelancing for the Radio Times magazine, BBC News, all of that.

In my head, I was still a freelancer. So when I tell you that I’ve spent thirty years doing this, I am not lying, but my accountant would wiggle his hand a little about the patch from 1999 to 2012. And unfortunately, even as my head tells me I was freelance, my head apparently forgot.

I forgot to be always looking for the next gig. I forgot that freelance work, no matter what way they choose to spell the word freelance, is always going to vanish.

So in 2012 when the BBC had another time that it had to be seen to save money and for once actually did, I lost all that Radio Times work completely. All of it. In one go. The BBC News work had dribbled away, too, and I hadn’t minded because at RT I was usually doing the equivalent of eight days work a week.

I think it was May 2012, I’m pleased to say that I’m no longer sure what month it was. But I lost it all very quickly and it was frightening.

Cue the conversation.

I wish I could remember how I found Writing West Midlands, I cannot pin down the route from living in Birmingham and finding them. Not in this way, not for this. I was aware of them from the Birmingham Literature Festival that they run. But in some way, I made contact, not even really sure why I was asking and what I was asking.

Jonathan Davidson of Writing West Midlands told me. He told me at that coffee stall in New Street Station extremely early one morning in 2012. Sized me up, asked me questions, made some suggestions, made some recommendations. The one I remember most distinctly was that he decided I’d be good at going into schools. “I’d like that,” I lied. Visiting a school seemed up there with weekly fitness classes at my dentist, but I wasn’t going to admit that.

I’ve just checked. Since that conversation, I’ve done 70 sessions in schools across the UK. I blame him.

That’s one of the many concrete suggestions he had, but I remember all of this because it was the start of rebuilding my confidence as a writer. I mean, I’m a writer, we don’t know from confidence, but I also hadn’t realised just how stripped back mine had become because of losing the BBC work. I thought I was low, I think now that I was much lower.

So usually I remember this because of how much better things are for me now as a writer. It’s still not a wine and roses kind of job, but I’m writing full time even during the lockdown and – I think – I’m writing the best I ever have.

The reasons that I’m particularly thinking of this today, though, are, well, many. Last night I finished writing a play that Jonathan has been encouraging me to do for more than a year. And also last night a friend told me he’d just had a meeting with him and that something in the meeting had reminded Jonathan of his one with mine all those years ago.

And I’m thinking of it because Jonathan Davidson will always get you writing, forever help you out with practical advice, and never mention that he writes too.

Well, bollocks to that. The man has a new book coming out and he’s promoting it with some deeply absorbing blog posts on his website. Here’s the site, here’s the new book. Go step inside the head of a man I owe.

Childhood’s start

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I’ve been waiting all week to tell you something but instead a completely different, pretty much entirely forgotten memory has come back. I’d vow to you that it was entirely forgotten, except that obviously I’ve remembered it.

It’s about a friend I had in school. I won’t name him, chiefly because I cannot quite grasp his name across all these years – but we fell out. I’m not sure when it was now. Fourth year of school? Fifth? No idea. Plus I’ve no clue what happened, though I suspect that’s not just because the chasm of time involved. I’ve a sense that didn’t know then, either. I remember it hurt. It was one of those where your friend is suddenly someone else’s friend instead, you know the thing.

But as I close my eyes, really squeeze them tight shut and try to remember his name or even just picture him, what I’m seeing instead is a Doctor Who book. For some reason, and who knows why, the closest thing I’ve got to a concrete memory is of his reading a Who book called Horror of Fang Rock by Terrance Dicks.

I hope he was a Doctor Who fan, that it wasn’t just the book he’d happened to pick up out of the school library. Because he should’ve stuck with me, kid. For this week I’m the one who got to make an obituary speech about Terrance Dicks at the Writers’ Guild Awards.

More than 200 of the UK’s finest writers watched me speak – and so did Terrance Dicks’s family. I’m not sure which made me more nervous, but his family being in the room, these writers, the sheer honour of talking at those awards and the unimaginable privilege of being the one to deliver this writer’s obituary, I was shaking before I started.

I’m relieved to tell you it went fine. Actually, solely since it’s you, I’ll tell you that it could not have gone one pixel better.

But if it was all the thinking about my own reading of Dicks’s novels back in the day that brought this old school friend to mind, this has coincidentally been a bit of a week for nostalgia all round. And not all of it good.

I’ve been watching Alan Plater’s 1990s episodes of Dalziel and Pascoe, remembering the stories he told me about its production, and getting weirdly sentimental about the days when mobile phones were bricks and there were still Dillons bookstores.

I’ve been reading one of Isaac Asimov’s books, The End of Eternity. When I was a schoolboy, I thought it and he were marvellous. It didn’t take much growing up for me to spot that Asimov writes like a schoolboy, but still the ideas in that book are tremendous. Unfortunately, this week I learned that Asimov used to go around snapping at the elastic on women’s bras. And reportedly rather than shaking some woman’s hand once, he shook her breast instead.

Cheers, Isaac. Made me queasy. I read your autobiography, I want to un-read it now.

Fortunately, though, there was one more thing this week. Something much nicer.

This week I can tell you of a 1970s legend whose reputation will never be tainted. He might have a world-size ego, but this time he earned it, he deserves to think this highly of himself.

At the Writers’ Guild Awards this Monday, I met and shook paws with Hartley Hare.

He presented the Best Children’s Television Award with his friends Nigel Plaskitt and Gail Renard. (Danger Mouse won, by the way. I punched the air when I found that out, I was so pleased.)

Anyway, follow me for a second. You know that at an awards show, there is a winner and there are runners-up. The presenter says who has been nominated before they read out the winner’s name, and they also say a little something about each show.

There was nothing different about how it was done at these awards, but it was in every way different for me because I wrote the descriptions of the children’s shows. I wrote the descriptions that Hartley Hare read out.

I have written dialogue for Hartley Hare. And I got to be the one to pay tribute to Terrance Dicks.

Take that, you Horror-of-Fang-Rock-schoolfriend-somebody thingy thing.

Skip

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I’m not sure now whether it’s my age or just the age that we live in. But really often, I’ll start watching something and there will be an advert first, with a countdown. We never used to have countdowns or progress bars, but now we do and typically it says something like “your video will play in 10 seconds, 9, 8…”

And I’m exasperated at having to wait six more seconds.

I mean, I know I’m busy, but now five seconds, four, come on.

Some ads have to be played to the end –– and actually, if you’re on YouTube, for instance, the YouTuber only gets paid if the whole ad is seen –– but others do have that skip feature.

“You can skip in four, 3, for god’s sake how long is 2, 1…”

Back when we had terrestrial TV but DVRs had come in so that you could pause live television and then fast-wind through the ads, I thought advertisers missed a trick. Someone, surely, should’ve done an ad that only made sense when seen played at 20 times normal speed.

But today’s advertisers have caught on. They know you’re going to skip, so they front-load the first six or ten seconds of the ad with the best bit they can.

The first ten seconds of an advert are now like a pilot episode of a series. They come in fast, establish the characters, make their point and hope that you want to stick around for the next episode or, in this case, the next twenty seconds.

And just as with TV pilots, you’re now seeing a range of approaches. There’s the big, splashy, look-at-me flashy advert. But over time, we’ve started to get ones that are more slow, subtle, and gently seductive ones. And the ones that will stop me tapping on Skip tend to be ones with characters talking.

Both TV drama and adverts need to get your attention and then they want to persuade you to do something. With drama, it’s to keep watching and please come back for episode 2. With adverts, it’s stop watching videos and go buy something.

Adverts are meant to be a punch to your attention and drama wants to move in with you. But in both cases, I think there’s friction between grabbing your eyes and then keeping your brain.

And – this could well just be me – I think in both cases the makers get one shot. I could be wrong, and I may be unfair. Especially as at the moment I appear to be being hounded by ads for SquareSpace and I’ve been through the stages of shrugging, harrumphing and on into thinking I might look into them the next time I do a website.

But usually, if I’ve skipped an ad the first time I see it, I skip it every time.

And it’s exactly as hard to get me to come back for the second episode of a show. I understand, for instance, that Luther is a good series, but it lost me on episode 1. Maybe you remember the show better than I do, but I recall there being an impossible crime and if was ever even solved, the real conclusion was that the person who did it is an incredible criminal mastermind of evil.

But I’m sitting there thinking even I could’ve done that exact same crime and been back home in time for lunch. That meant the criminal mastermind of evil wasn’t much cop and the lead police detective character was no cop.

I’d have kept watching if that had been deliberate, but I was supposed to admire both characters and so I simply never watched another minute.

Grief. That was ten years ago. I just looked it up to see how many episodes I haven’t watched – 19 out of the 20, as it happens – and the first one aired in May 2010.

Who could’ve imagined even a decade ago that today episodes would also end with “Next episode begins in 10, 9, 8…”?

As I write this to you, the next Self Distract is in 606,300 seconds. 606,299. 606,298… You could kill a few seconds by joining my new mailing list or perhaps by buying one of my books or Doctor Who radio dramas. I’d be fine with either.