drama

What I swear by

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If you’re going to swear in a drama, I think you should do it really early on in the episode. This is just a thought, obviously, but the only time I ever notice swearing is when it is in a drama and specifically when comes in late.

Well, there’s the famous scene in The Wire which has two detectives saying “fuck” in every possible connotation, expression and meaning, but after the first five or ten fucks you’re no longer watching detectives, you’re hearing the writer having a good time. And you do have to be a little conscious that Veronica Mars would’ve figured out the crime scene and be off again around an hour faster than these two.

I don’t tend to swear in real life and my problem with The Wire is not that it had swearing, it’s how the swearing in this specific scene broke the delicate little bubble that a drama lives in. There’s a moment in Star Trek: Picard where someone describes Jean-Luc Picard has having a fucking cheek, and it’s perfect. First swearing in 700-odd hours of Star Trek, and it’s perfect because she would say that, he did have a fucking cheek, it was actually a pinprick bursting a different kind of bubble and it’s possible that I may even have cheered. Certainly it helped me get into the story.

But although I remember that coming quite a bit into the episode, I also remember that it was one of the first things this particular character said. And I think that matters. To me, anyway.

There’s no special reason for why I don’t tend to swear, it’s not that I think I’m a family show or that I fear you’ll be shocked. I just don’t care about swearing and you wouldn’t, except it has caused problems. Countless times – okay, not very many but I definitely didn’t count them – a friend will, it seems to me, suddenly stop talking and apologise. It’s always because they’ve just sworn and they’ve somehow recognised that I don’t, but it’s also always, invariably, inescapably a mystery to me why they’re stopping.

If I had noticed the swearing, I wouldn’t care, but the reality is that I haven’t noticed. Now I sound like I don’t listen. But most of the time when people swear, it’s like small punctuation rather than some raging use of strong language. I am all for strong language, language should be strong, language is strong. So “Where did I leave my sodding keys,” just isn’t up there for strength.

Fine. That’s true in drama as well as real life, and my noticing Star Trek: Picard was less because it was the first swearword in – hang on, I can check this – yes, in 56 years of that show. It was more because it was right.

Only, I was watching a drama for work this week when, I think, about 15 minutes in, the lead character said “fuck”.

And it was not right. It jarred.

Apparently I can take it when an admiral curses at Starfleet Command in the 24th Century, but I can’t when a contemporary inner-city UK police officer does.

But it was wrong because, I think, it was said more for effect than anything else. There’s no way to know these things really, but I had such a strong sense that it was said explicitly to tell us that this was proper, grown-up drama.

And if you need to tell us that you’re proper, grown-up drama, well, you aren’t. Maybe that was really my problem here: this show that I am not naming felt like it was daytime drama. It didn’t seem as cheap as those have to be, but there was something, there was a patina that shouted daytime TV to me. It had this added patina of being contrived and somehow constrained, and it was also missing something.

It was missing the intangible something that makes you forget you’re watching a show and instead get into it.

Maybe if the show had been better I wouldn’t have been stopped and made to think all of this. As it was, more characters then swore at what felt like carefully negotiated intervals after that, and it was all too late. I had the sense every time from there to the end of the episode that when a character swore, what they really said was something like “Fuck that, look at me, I’m swearing, this isn’t daytime TV you know, this is great, be impressed”.

Children swear as they try to sound adult and you have the sense that they know the sound of the words, but not the meaning. That’s what I got here.

It’s not as if there can or should be a rule about anything, but I just wonder if I’d not have been so annoyingly knocked out of the story if the character had sworn at the start of the episode. I wonder if it would’ve helped us know her. And I’m quite sure that doing it this much later rather detached the swearing from the character and made it sound like an editorial decision, debated over by the writer and producer and director.

Obviously I can’t swear to that.

B-E-I-D…

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“You’re part of it now.”

The now late Shirley Rubinstein, wife of writer Alan Plater, said that to me ten years ago. My book with the long title, “BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair” was just coming out and Beiderbecke meant more to her than it did even to me. “The Beiderbecke Affair” is a 1980s ITV drama by Alan Plater and both he and Shirley have told me that it, plus its sequels, is really “Alan and Shirley having adventures”.

This is a case of maybe you’ve heard of “The Beiderbecke Affair” and maybe you haven’t. But it’s also a case where if you have heard of it, if you do know it, it’s something personal to you, you don’t think anyone else has heard of it. It isn’t six one-hour episodes that were a hit watched by millions, it is two characters, Trevor Chaplin and Average-Sized Mrs Swinburne, it is two friends of yours.

More than two, there’s Big Al and Little Norm as well. Later on there is the character with my favourite name in the entirety of television drama: “Peterson – the Man with No Name”.

Even this week, someone said that they thought they were the only person who knew this show. And for some years after the book came out, I would be contacted by Beiderbecke fans who thought exactly the same thing. One of them sent me a Google map with all of the show’s filming locations marked out and he seemed so pleased that I’d be as interested as he was in it.

Right from the first showing in 1985, “The Beiderbecke Affair” had this way of gluing you to it like a fan, but also cocooning you in the story, in the Beiderbecke world, like it was just you, Jill and Trevor, not millions of others.

Watch it now – a peculiarly edited version is on BritBox and they won’t tell me why they’ve cut the bits they have – and I think it’s still seductive. It’s a drama series in which nothing seems to happen, yet not because it’s a piece of Sunday night light fluff. I suppose it’s gentle, but again that’s now a pejorative word for me and brings to mind empty dramas where the baddies always get their comeuppance. Alan Plater wrote once that he preferred dramas to be about people being, living, not thrown into melodramatic situations. Beiderbecke is a slice of Jill and Trevor’s life, and it’s only by the end of six episodes that you really register just how very much has happened.

Six episodes. With ad breaks, that’s considerably less than six hours of television drama and I’m still writing about it 37 years later. Quite right too.

Shirley was obviously aware of the impact of the show, she’d had the fans and the letters. I’m proud of the fact that – although I’ve forgotten how this could possibly have come about – I am the reason Alan Plater got a fan letter from Chris Beiderbecke, grandson or later of the musician, Bix Beiderbecke.

When Shirley said I was part of it now, I felt so proud. I can see her saying it to me, holding a copy of the book.

“You’re part of it now,” she said. “Whenever anyone looks for The Beiderbecke Affair, whenever anyone even just Googles the word ‘Beiderbecke’, your book will come up.”

“If they can spell Beiderbecke,” I said.

Be a fraud

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I am reasonably sure that there hasn’t been a single day in my adult life when I haven’t written. Maybe it’s just a sketchy idea, maybe it’s this right here, writing to you, but it will have been something. Something where I thought by writing, by typing.

Also, frankly, by shrugging. I don’t have “Write Something” on my To Do list. If I didn’t do it, I’d now be a bit surprised, but hardly concerned. There isn’t a rule that writers have to write every day and I don’t imagine you’d think there was, except enough people do that it’s a little issue.

It came up at the National Writers’ Conference earlier this month, for instance. Don’t let me make it sound like the whole conference stopped to gasp, it was just one small moment in a large day — but consequently, it’s also come up in conversations since.

The idea that writers should write every day is the kind of thing that anyone who isn’t a writer would barely register being said. And if they did hear it, did register it and even if they did happen to believe it with a passion, it doesn’t affect them.

Yet there are enough writers who are troubled enough by this idea that it comes up in conferences. I think I’m already making too big a deal of it, so let me just offer that any kind of idea that makes writers feel guilty is bollocks.

All that matters is what lands on the page or the screen, and I don’t see that worrying about not having written yesterday is in any way a help to you writing today. It’s easily the opposite: if you build up this idea that you’re a fraud for not writing every day, I suspect it becomes harder to write any day.

Do whatever you need to get to the finishing line and if that is writing every day, fine. If it’s writing just when you can, well, I’m going to look you in the eye and suggest there’s probably a bit more you can do, but I won’t do that very firmly.

Because if your failing to write every day means you’re a fraud, then be a fraud. Be very a fraud. All that matters is what ends up on the page and the screen, whatever it takes, however long it takes, whether it’s a daily effort or not.

I happen to find it easy and normal and ordinary to write every day, and that’s nice for me. The real worry is whether you or I write anything that’s actually remotely good, and here I need to stop looking you in the eye.

Seeking out strange new worlds, and liking them

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Funny. I used to explain that for me the one-hour television format was as vital as the three-minute pop song was to so many others. But then the so-many-others dwindled to the point where the phrase three-minute-pop-song became vaguely factual instead of totemic.

Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 “Born to Run” helped that happen, incidentally. Its 4’30” running time was one of the first songs to show US radio stations that tracks didn’t have to be three minutes or under to be hits.

(Mind you, US radio stations are weird. For decades they had a rule that you couldn’t play two songs by women in a row. No rule against men, play those all you like, but a woman’s song followed by another woman’s song, nope. Listeners don’t like it, listeners can’t cope, and listeners will tune to another station.

There is no way in which this is sane and no way in which it is good. Except that it is specifically the reason Sarah McLachlan created the Lilith Fair concerts in the 1990s. The concert albums that resulted remain some of my favourites.

US radio didn’t learn its lesson, incidentally. Rather than doing anything interesting, they fixed the problem of listeners switching stations by making every station identical, and by having the same firms own every station. Switch if you like, it’s the same music for you, the same bottom line for them.)

Anyway.

Music and television. If no one but me uses the three-minute phrase to describe anything today but boiling eggs, still there is a connection between music and TV. A connection and a parallel.

You know the story that Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” has just become a number 1 hit 37 years after it came out, and that this is down to the TV show “Stranger Things” playing it.

I see your 37 years and raise you 57.

In 1965, a pilot was made in the States about the voyages of a starship and in 2022, that pilot went to series. Fifty-seven years. Six decades. I know that as a species, we writers think decisions take a long time, but, come on.

As soon as you read the words “these are the voyages”, I think you know what this is about. If I mentioned that you need to go places boldly, that pretty much certainly nails it. And beyond adding “strange new worlds”, you just need to hear “starship Enterprise” to be totally certain you know the show.

But that pilot episode of “Star Trek” wasn’t the same show that got on the air, limped along, died, and became a pop culture behemoth with, what, a dozen feature films and as many different TV series. That pilot episode was canned and legend – honestly, there’s legend on this – is that it was because it was “too cerebral”. Viewers wouldn’t like it, viewers wouldn’t cope, viewers would change channel.

You can see that pilot episode easily enough and god help us if that’s what counted as cerebral in 1965. I was born in 1965 and I swear I could’ve grasped that pilot even then. I can imagine me all pink and hot, lying there in my first cot and gurgling “yes, yes, it’s all an illusion created by those aliens, we get it, and why don’t the women characters have anything to do?”

The show got a second pilot where it was turned into the series you know, love, and/or are at least aware of. Captain Pike was out, Captain Kirk was in.

And now, 57 years later, Pike is back in.

That 1965 pilot called “Star Trek” has now gone to series as “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” and it came to the UK this week as Paramount+ launched here. Three episodes of the show are available in the UK so far, I think ten have streamed in the States.

It’s not cerebral. But it is very good. I tried out the first episode and the next thing you know, I’ve seen all three. I tried out the first episode to see how it worked, to examine how a 2022 production would claim to be set ten years before the 1960s show.

That was what was fascinating to me, that’s why I was drawn in. There is all the production side, and I understand there are Star Trek fans who think the sets should have been made to look exactly like the 1960s show, but then there are always idiots. It’s a long time since I saw any of the original Star Trek, yet you watch this new show and it feels like they’ve got it right.

This is how the USS Enterprise looked in the 1960s, it just wasn’t done as well as it is now. These are the characters from the 1960s, they just weren’t done a fraction as well then as they are now.

That’s what changed this show for me, changed it from an intellectual — possibly even cerebral — curiosity, into a series I just want to watch because I enjoy it.

I have to put some effort into ignoring the 1960s-style haircut that Captain Pike has, but otherwise I’m already deep into the story. Except when Nurse Chapel is on and I cannot fail to marvel at how finally, finally, six decades finally, she is given something to do.

You can tell me about the differences in filming style, or production, or direction, or special effects, and I am interested, but it’s the writing that matters. These old characters are new because they are written so much better.

Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s unfair to say that a 2022 television drama is better than a 1960s one. We are all a product of our time, and my time is 2022, so I would prefer it.

Only, the argument has been made that Running Up That Hill is a 1980s song in form as well as simply fact. That it is a product of its time, that it was made using very specific synthesisers and styles of back then, and consequently it is dated. Bollocks to that. It was a favourite of mine then, it’s deeply powerful now, even though its writing literally has not changed one note in between.

Star Trek’s writing had to change radically for that old show to work sixty years later, but it did, and it has, and it does. Dammit, I’m going to have to stick with Paramount+ after the free trial ends, just to see what happens next.

Streaming services. Subscription television. It’s a strange old world.

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.

Ringing the changes

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I don’t think people know how to use phones any more.

Quick story. It’s some time in the 1980s and I’m in a producer’s office, pitching him a factual idea for BBC Radio 4 that I’d called “555”. It was about the then little-known fact that every telephone number uttered in any American film or TV show began with the area code 555. Today you’d make a YouTube video about it and about how America’s Bell Telephone Co reserved that whole code for filmmakers, but back then I had a good case for also finding the UK equivalent, looking into the stories of what happens when shows use real phone numbers instead, and so on.

Back then, in that office, though, I am also there when the producer’s phone rings precisely as I first say “555”, and when he answers but there’s no one there. Back then, this kind of dead call was rare enough that he hung up the receiver and said that it was surely a sign that we should make this show.

We never did.

Anyway. Today, yes, I get three or four dead calls a day. I know that I can block them on my iPhone but only in such a way that I also block calls from people offering me work, so, you know, I put up with the dead calls. Incidentally, I’ve learned that if I pick up and do not say a word, a huge proportion of the time, they hang up. You can’t imagine me not talking. Thanks.

That aside, I know you just pictured me picking up my iPhone and putting it to my ear. Or you definitely pictured the 1980s producer picking up the phone receiver and holding it to his.

And that’s what I see changing. Maybe it’s just a greater awareness of my surroundings post-pandemic lockdowns, but now I seem to see a lot more people talking on their phones as I walk around outside – and none of them put those phones to their ears. It’s now always, always, that they hold the phones out in front of them and are using the speakerphone.

I’m not saying this is wrong, it’s just that it’s like the sudden majority don’t know there used to be this thing about holding it to your ear. Sometimes it’s like they don’t want to hold the phone that closely, it’s like they are staring at this device in fear of its witchcraft and/or post-Brexit roaming charges. Sometimes they’re tweeting while they talk and sometimes that leads them into a tree. Or sometimes they’re on video calls and I like video calls, I’m just a little less keen at staring up someone’s nose while we talk.

But it’s now so common to see phones used being this way that if you do see someone holding a phone up to their ear, either they are old or you are in a film.

I know mobile phones killed off a lot of cheap tricks in drama, like the ominous slow pan to the ringing hall telephone seconds after the hero has left on what we know is probably not a fatal errand but we’re supposed to think that this week it just could be. Or when characters are trying to call each other at the same time so the lines are engaged and that’s it, we’re on our own now.

I also know that mobiles have opened up new drama possibilities, like saying you’re in one place when you’re in another, or being tracked by which cellphone towers your call goes through, or Android phone users being able to call for help while iPhone ones look for a charger.

But I didn’t know how the use of phones has so visually changed.

Or maybe I just don’t know why so many people now believe I must hear both sides of their conversation. Look, you were on a break, okay?

Voice control

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I was told this week that a character I’d written was clearly my creation, my type of character, and yet simultaneously also straight out of an Alan Plater drama. It was meant as a compliment and I took it as high praise.

Partly, actually, because one of my favourite things about Plater’s writing was when he dramatised Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War books. Watch the series, read the books, it’s clearly Manning throughout and yet the TV series is also simultaneously in Plater’s own voice too. I cannot fathom how he did that.

But I can fathom voice. I used to be proud of being able to adapt to any house style, any requirement, and now, not so much. I’m not proud of it and I don’t think I can do it anymore. Not when I now so cherish how a friend once recognised I was the writer of a particular piece, even when the job had required me to not sign or byline it. That reminded me of the radio broadcaster Fi Glover: the first minute I heard her on air, I knew who it was because I’d read her book.

She writes the way she speaks, which is fantastic and damn hard and may not be the only way to write but I have such a fondness for it that I think maybe it should be. Perhaps just on weekdays.

There’s also that I know, from direct experience, that you can encourage a writer to find their own voice but until the day they do, they’re as likely to have no clue what you even mean. Maybe we all start off trying to write like our favourite writers and maybe there just comes a day when you say sod that and write like yourself, but there comes that day, and there comes your voice.

Only…

I think the start of writing is finding this voice, but I worry that the end of writing is holding on to it too tightly.

This week I came across a few pages of The Golden Age, an unfinished theatre play script about 1960s British television. It may be that only those few pages were ever written, because I can’t find any trace of a full play being performed. I shouldn’t tell you who wrote it, but if you read it, you’d recognise the voice immediately. Just as you’d know it was a theatre script, even though at no point does it say that, or anything like it.

Suddenly, I’m wondering if I’m wrong and it was an unfinished TV script. I don’t think so. Plus, incidentally, the 1960s weren’t the golden age of television, we’re living in the golden age now. But I reckon that the play was started somewhere in the early 2000s, so the writer wasn’t to know.

It’s fine. Good gags, a wry and very clear opinion, but it’s the same opinion as in this writer’s other work. And though the specific words of the jokes are different, they’re really the same. The same kind of setup and the same kind of payoff, the same type of character making the same type of point.

Look, it was never finished so maybe this writer thought the same as I do.

But it’s like when you watch an Aaron Sorkin drama. There’s never the slightest pixel of a doubt who wrote it, and there are a thousand points to love and relish, but he has a very precise voice, he has a particular shtick.

And while his writing is so good that I have watched and many times rewatched his Sports Night comedy despite caring even less about sport than I know about it, it’s also so good that it stays with you. And consequently, I couldn’t watch his The Newsroom series, even though I really tried.

The trouble for me is that while the lead character in that, Will McAvoy, is apparently very good, I could never quite see him through the crowd of previous Sorkin characters standing in his way. This line sounds like Jed Bartlett from The West Wing, that one is clearly Danny Tripp from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and this is unquestionably Will McAvoy quoting Casey McCall from Sports Night.

In Sorkin’s case, he does also repeat stories between shows, which doesn’t help. A couple of characters in different series discover their father has been having an affair for decades, for instance, and a window gets startlingly smashed by someone in roughly identical situations in Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60.

There’s also the, to me, totally riveting issue of a man pursuing a woman. In Sports Night, you’re rooting for the two to get together. In Studio 60, the same story is creepy as hell.

So there is a difference in Sorkin’s characters, but again, you always know it’s him.

I think that’s great. I think a clear and strong voice is exciting and is so different to all the could-be-by-anyone dramas.

Only, his voice gets in his way for me, at least with The Newsroom. And on a rather smaller scale, I worry that having long found my own voice, it’s become too locked in for my own good.

High yearnings

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I need to write a character who is yearning for something and I don’t seem able to do it. I also need him to be stupid but that’s easier, I’ve got form on that, not to mention a mirror.

Possibly I’m a bit fuzzy because right now, I mean exactly as I type this to you, I’m rather hoping that my COVID self test is going to turn out okay. I’m quite keen that it does, of course, a little anxious since I just was in a school talking with 150 people and am now feeling a bit rough, but still, that doesn’t feel like yearning. I’d appreciate your sticking with me for the next 15 minutes, however. Let’s talk so I don’t keep watching the clock.

The other night, I rewatched the first episode of “Hearts and Bones” by Stewart Harcourt. It’s so long since it aired back in, I think, 2000, that it practically counts as a first watch. But if I remembered very little of it from back when I must’ve reviewed the preview tapes for BBC Ceefax, what I knew in my, well, heart and my bones, was that it is achingly full of yearning. Some deeply hidden, some overt, all painful and all real. I need exactly that for this thing I’m trying to write.

You keep being told that characters in drama must want something or it isn’t drama, and I would go off on one there about how I understand this is a very Western view of dramatic form and there are others. Mind you, I don’t know the others. Shorter conversation than I expected.

If Western is all you can write, and now I suddenly see you wearing a cowboy hat which you are frankly pulling off better than I could, then I know that it doesn’t really matter what the character wants. They just must want it and if they get it immediately, the story is probably over. There’s a bit of me that wants to think bollocks, you just have to find a better story for immediately afterwards, but the principle isn’t wrong. Want something, blocked by something else, there’s at least the start of a story and, most importantly, the start of a character.

“Hearts and Bones” leads off with one character, Emma, longing, yearning, for another, a man named Rich, who happens to be her boyfriend’s brother. Dervla Kirwan plays Emma and I’m not sure she’s ever been better because Harcourt gives her moments of silence where the depth of feeling she portrays will squeeze your chest. I wish I could read the script.

Maybe it helps that she wants something specific, someone specific, but really she doesn’t. I mean, she does, but as well as the pull of attraction to this man, there’s the push of wanting, needing to get away from her life being the way it is. So it’s a specific, definable desire that actually embodies a vague, indefinable need.

I’ve realised that I don’t fully care whether my character gets whatever this nebulous thing is he wants. I’m not being coy or secretive about what he needs, I am really just struggling to vocalise it. Odd how it can be so clear in my head and yet what’s clear is that this overriding desire is something impossible to grab hold off and define.

Perhaps that’s the difference between fancying a particular man or woman and needing something impossible to define, to imagine, maybe even impossible to get. If all that happened in “Hearts and Bones” was that Emma fancies Rich, it might be soap, it wouldn’t be drama.

Okay. I see what you’ve done here. You’ve realised that I am yearning to write yearning. Smartarse.

If nothing else is clear, though, my COVID test is. Thanks for holding my hand.

The good, the bad, and who’s fault it is

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You know the way that music appears to slot into decades. A 1970s song is unmistakeable from a 1990s one, for instance. Clearly that cannot be true, there is no possible way that all musicians get together to decide on a style to last from January 1, 1990, to December 31, 2000. It’s our perspective, imposing this division by decades, it has to be.

And yet it’s also definitely true.

I’m minded of this because I think a lot about how no writing, from songs to drama, can be entirely divorced from when it was written. That would presumably be because no writer can be, either. But for me, it’s been an issue of degrees. All shows are of their time, but some seem it more than others, and some continue to stand up well despite their age. That’s the phrase, that they stand up well despite being old. But films and TV don’t actually age, they are frozen in the moment of creation and it’s we who age around them.

So when I wince at something I’m watching from the 1980s, perhaps it’s blameless and I’m the one who has aged.

The reason this goes around my mind a lot and the reason I listen to this little storm in my head is that I’m usually wondering about something I’m writing. I can’t see or appreciate what it is about it that’s later going to seem so obviously bound to today, but I also can’t see whether the piece is any good or not. I can’t see whether it’s me making it good or bad, or whether it’s leaning so much into its time that it’s nothing to do with me.

For instance, there is music I like perhaps less because of itself and more because of the time it connects me to. There are a couple of tracks by The Eagles that I think are musically quite remarkable and I feel their undertow, I feel they are somehow right and good. But then I listen to an Eagles album and think it’s rubbish. The songs I know from way back when are enormously better than the songs I don’t know from way back when, but which were written and made exactly then.

Possibly I just like the band’s hits. Yet I have wondered whether there isn’t any such thing as objectively good or bad, whether it’s the luck of what time and place the piece connects audiences to. Connect enough people and you’ve got a hit.

But then I rewatched Oliver’s Travels last week.

It’s a 1990s five-part TV drama series by Alan Plater and I strongly suspect it’s really a six-part drama but nobody could make it to the end. There is some poor direction, there are excellent actors in entirely the wrong parts for them, and if it doesn’t scream 1990s to me very loudly, it’s because I’m more deafened by how it yells Alan Plater.

Everything I relished about my friend’s writing is right there in Oliver’s Travels and not one pixel of it works. He told me about problems with the production and there isn’t an actor, a critic or even just a viewer who doesn’t instantaneously realise the piece was poorly cast. But it just isn’t written well and if it’s hard to see that – not to mention hard to say – then for once you can look beyond direction and casting and the whole production because Alan’s original Oliver’s Travels novel is rubbish too.

Sorry, Alan.

But it’s a good thing. It tells me to shut up about drama being bound to the time it is written in and it tells me that the key part is not time, it’s written. If it’s not on the page, it isn’t ever going to be on the screen.

And it’s writers who put it on the page.

We can make it to the Mexican border by nightfall

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So very long ago now, I used to write sometimes for an entertainment website – I’ve done this a lot and for more sites and magazines than I can reliably remember – and I was there when this one decided to launch TV episode guides. Even then, there were a fair few of these online, but they did tend to be either barebones TV Guide-style listings, or gushing fan tributes. This site wanted to become known for having the best episode guides, ones that were genuinely useful to someone looking up a detail, were totally accurate in that detail, and were also just a good read.

Really, they wanted readers to know the staff knew their stuff: the site wanted to be seen as an authority. So it had to be obvious that the guide wasn’t just rephrasing listing or PR copy, this all had to clearly be written by people who watched these episodes.

That’s a pretty ambitious, er, ambition. Not from the writing: the entire staff and all the freelancers like me had been writing about television drama for years on this and other publications. But it was dauntingly ambitious to start off on what was planned to become this enormous, comprehensive guide to just about everything.

I can’t remember all of the shows that something like five or six people were assigned first. But here’s how long ago this was: I got the then-new “Brothers and Sisters” season 1. I’ve just had to check and it apparently aired in 2006, which is a lot more recently than I’d remembered. I also had not remembered that there were 23 episodes in that first season.

Plus I can’t recall how long I got to watch them. I do remember a faintly feverish sense about it, I remember thinking I could just fit in one more episode if I did this or that, if so-and-so was as late as they usually are. I want to say I watched the season in a week, I am certain it was well under a month. Let’s call it ten days.

Ten days, one season, done, written about, filed, and I waited for what the next assignment would be.

It never came. Not on episode guides.

Instead, when my copy finally got read, I was told off. Taken to one side and told off.

At this distance, I can’t possibly remember the criticism, the specific words they used. But actually even right then, on the day, sitting in front of an unhappy editor, I believe my mind translated the words into “you wrote it too well”.

Because no one else watched any of their assigned shows.

Not one episode.

Everyone else had just rephrased and padded out listings and whatever they found online from the TV company’s PR people.

If you read mine, you knew I’d watched. If you read any of theirs, you knew they hadn’t. I’m not claiming that I wrote well and they did not, but I did and they didn’t.

I was told that I had to cut my piece back, strip out as much as possible, and make it look like everybody else’s. I truly can’t remember and strongly suspect I didn’t say fuck that, but I know for certain that I didn’t do it. Just as I know for certain that the site never became known for any episode guides at all. Tellingly, to find out for you when this was and how many episodes there were in Brothers and Sisters, I looked up epguides.com, not this entertainment site.

God in heaven.

I’ve just checked on a whim and this site I’m not naming still exists, albeit in a radically different form. I couldn’t possibly resist: I’ve done a search on it for Brothers and Sisters season 1.

The site says it aired in 1998, which it didn’t. It lists this 2006 drama as drama, which is true, but also incorrectly says that it’s children’s TV.

I’m surprised to say that there is a guide, though it’s just 50 words or so per episode. I hope it’s not based on my writing: it reads like a short, flat PR/TV Guide listing. I suspect the actual listings whenever this show airs are automatically pulled from the guide: the format has that kind of feel to it.

Anyway.

The argument for cutting mine down to match everyone else’s was that the site had to look consistent. Fine, I definitely thought and I hope I said, be consistent by having them do their assignment, watch the bloody shows and write better.

To my mind, the argument against cutting down to match everyone else’s was what’s the point? For the sake of a consistent look, they were throwing away all of this ambition, every single bit of their aim for the entire project.

I didn’t know they were also throwing away accuracy and I’m quite shaken by that. Partly from how you’ve just got to get facts right, but also because the first transmission date of a TV drama is not exactly a grey area.

Here’s the thing, though. I do understand that desire for consistency. And have even shared it.

I used to believe that there was a need for this on the other end of this TV episode guide issue, that there was a need for it in actual TV episodes too. I love television drama series and for all the myriad issues and possibilities in them, one thing seems a bit obviously true.

They’re series.

You hope for some great progression between episode 1 and episode 23, but episode 23 has to be the same show that episode 1 was. You can’t have episode 1 be serious, bone-crunching drama and episode 23 be a musical. Well, you can, and there are shows that pull off incredible ranges of episodes.

Only Doctor Who really manages that, though. Imagine if Line of Duty was piercing contemporary drama one week and stilted historical renactment the next. Or more possibly, imagine if one week Line of Duty felt authentic and in the next it didn’t.

There has to be a consistency and I remember adding that criticism to the very many others I had about ITV’s police soap, The Bill. Whenever JC Wilsher would write an episode, the characters sounded and felt and seemed like real police. When other people wrote episodes, not so much.

I felt this was wrong and that the series was doing a bad job.

But.

I was wrong.

And this is why I wanted to talk to you about this today, why it’s on my mind and –– I can’t say I expected this –– why an argument on an entertainment site from prehistory came back into my mind for the first time in decades.

Last night, I watched Look to the Lady, the first story in the BBC’s 1989/1990 dramatisation of Margery Allingham’s Campion novels. Some time last week I’d seen a later story in the short run and enjoyed it enough to want to watch more.

The story later in the run was fine. Look to the Lady was excellent. Much funnier, every character much more witty and just alive, and plot-heavy exposition conveyed with a twinkle in the eye. Loved it.

And knew I would.

Because this first story was dramatised from Allingham’s book by Alan Plater. Knowing he’d written it, my wife Angela asked beforehand whether it was going to be wittier than the last one. Because, she pointed out, whenever he wrote Lewis episodes, Inspector Lewis and didn’t-he-used-to-be-good Sergeant Hathaway were always smarter, faster, better than in other episodes.

It’s also true that the episode included this line about making it to the Mexican border that Alan seemed to enjoy fitting in to every show he could.

But if that was an unmistakeable signpost that he’d written the episode, it was never the case that he went so far as to make a show unrecognisable. It was never the case that Lewis and Hathaway were different characters in Plater’s episodes compared to other ones. It was just that you were more interested in them when he was the writer.

This is a case where I suspect I could have argued for more consistency right up until very recently, ie last night. But if my head sees the need for a series to be a series, my heart knows I’m wrong and it’s known that for a lot longer than 12 hours.

You want any series to be uniformly excellent, but it isn’t going to happen. Some episodes will be better than others, visibly and markedly so, but it is not the series getting it wrong for allowing that difference. It’s the series being damn lucky to have a great episode.