drama

Press Gang

Quote me no quotes

Posted by

One of the more irritating things about me –– I keep a list, it’s available on application –– is that I quote incessantly. It’s not as if I’m ever quoting something you’d know, either. That could even be good.

It’s also not as if I always realise it’s a quote. The line will have become part of me, part of my idiolect, but I didn’t think it up, not so much. Now I say that bit aloud, I realise I could’ve got away with just quoting. If you don’t know it’s a quote, you might get irritated by its repetition over the years, but you couldn’t know I stole the line. I would have got away with it, but for you pesky kid.

I wish you’d been pesky another week. Because the line I have been forcibly reminded is a quote, the line that made me want to confess my sins to you today, is really tough to set up clearly. Nonetheless, you’re here, I’m here, we’ve got my quote, let’s play our game.

Please imagine you and I have got to a party or somewhere and we are waiting to be let in. It has been known that when the door opens, I may gesture to you and tell the host that “I caught this one trying to escape.” That’s it. You may well struggle to imagine that it gets a laugh, but over the years, its hit rate is pretty good. It’s not as if I do it every day, that’s not what I’m saying, but it comes up and then it tends to come out of me practically involuntarily.

Okay.

I read a script every day, I suppose because I’m scriptwriter and I want to get better at it, but chiefly because I enjoy it and I see no reason to stop. Since I also appear to need to count things, I can tell you that last Tuesday’s script was the 491st I’ve read this year. Please take a look at page 37, scene 634 from that script:

EXT. CAMPBELL’S DRIVEWAY. EVENING.

…The Butler answers the door. Spike immediately drags Lynda through.

SPIKE: (To Butler) I caught this one trying to escape – dug a tunnel with a cocktail stick.

It’s Press Gang. Series 2, episode 6, “At Last a Dragon” by Steven Moffat. The script is dated March 1, 1989 – you can read it all right here – and I probably saw the episode around the time it aired, February 22, 1990. That’s 31 years, 9 months and 18 days ago. It’s 11,614 days back and I am still quoting what turns out to be half a line from what we’d now call a Young Adult series.

Give me some credit, it’s the better half of the line. But if you’re still imagining us standing at a door, please look at my face as I reach that line in the script and realise all of this.

I was a bit startled. It did also flash me back to interviewing Moffat on the Press Gang newsroom set. It flashed me back further to when I used to work in a large company and we had Christmas parties. I see myself and I don’t know, perhaps 20 other people, in the St John Swallow Hotel in Solihull, where I am the only person at the bar who is more interested in what’s on the TV set than in the bottles.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem it now, but back in the late 1980s, Press Gang simply looked better than anything else. Certainly better than anything else airing around that late afternoon children’s/teen slot. I’m at the bar, the TV is on, the sound is off, and I’m wondering what this movie is I’m watching.

I can’t pin down the date I was at that bar, I can’t guess what Press Gang episode was being shown then. But I can pin down that it was 1,659 weeks and 1 day since I saw “At Last a Dragon”.

And I can tell you that the script still stands up. I’m not overkeen on the cocktail stick line, that’s not going to take a place in my idiolect, but I could do with being able to write that well. Makes you wonder whether Steven Moffat went on to write anything else.

Write what you – no.

Posted by

This is doing the rounds again and maybe I’m not helping by grumbling about it. But this week I’ve been overhearing the phrase that writers should write what they know and I would like to offer that I know something about this.

I know it’s bollocks.

“Write what you know” is usually either said by people who aren’t writers, or by writers who are talking to people who aren’t and who they just want to get rid of. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, but I do know people who will ask what my current project is and then interrupt part way through the second syllable of the answer. I do tend to then wrap it up with “and, you know” while they say something about how I never tell them what I’m doing.

That’s just irritating me, that doesn’t matter. This “write what you know” idea does matter because it is damaging. There are writers who will believe it and you and I can only hope they recover.

I sound harsh, but then I intend to. If you know a time when you’ve heard it said with the best of intentions, I think it’s like it was interrupted part way through the second syllable. There is a crucial, crucial part that follows and which I’m going to have to make up since it’s never actually been said in the history of writing.

It should go thisaway:

“Write what you know, not as in writing about how it was raining when you put the bins out this morning, but rather how old that made you feel, how the knowledge that you’ve put them out a thousand times and if you’re lucky may get to do it a thousand times more, about how the repetition of a simple chore seems to you to be a metaphor for the pointlessness of life itself, for your failure to achieve anything, and how it feels like a klaxon or a Cloister Bell sounding out how little time you’ve got left before you die.”

Granted, that’s a bit specific.

It also told you more about me than I wanted to –– and that is the point of writing. Diving deeper, revealing more, reaching out. Connecting. Not describing how I forgot the council isn’t collecting garden waste this week and had to go out in the rain again to drag that bin back.

I’ve been working on a play that’s about two friends of mine. Clearly, then, I know them, I am writing what I know. Except I’m not, I’m not at all because in writing it I have learned more about them both and I’ve churned over what I thought I knew, what I’ve discovered, what I feel about them. If they were still alive, I would’ve been round their house a hundred times asking questions.

Then just technically, it’s a difficult play to write and it mustn’t ever seem like it is to the audience. When I started it, I did not know whether I was actually capable of writing what I needed, both because of these startlingly difficult technical issues, and because it’s about friends. Three or four times, I woke up in the morning not only thinking about it, but shaking. Sweating.

You don’t need to know that, the audience for the play mustn’t ever know it, but it is the best thing I’ve ever written and that is specifically because it stretched me far, far and three times far away from anything I knew how to do. Seriously, the very structure of this thing is alien to how I would say I tend to write, but it’s the correct way to tell this story. I now know that it’s the only way to tell it, too.

Sorry I can’t tell you what it is yet. You will be the first.

But for now, I have to write what you don’t know.

Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice

Silent right

Posted by

Straight to it: the moment of silence during last week’s Strictly Come Dancing was profoundly moving. It came in the same weekend as Remembrance Day and the one-minute silence there, but maybe silence is stronger for being a surprise.

Well, I say a surprise. The Strictly show did go to some lengths to belabour how the dance by Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice would include something for the deaf community. They did it enough that I thought about how odd it was that they were electing to spoil some moment.

But then little is done without a reason.

Ayling-Ellis and Pernice dance and it is remarkable, it’s peculiar how one pair moving to music works and another doesn’t, but this is a particularly strong performance –– and then that dance continued even as the music stopped for a time. Dances on this show are only 90 seconds long so I don’t really have the faintest idea how short this gap was, but it was a strong gap and I actually gasped.

Strictly is a shiny-floor show, and I am as unlikely to be moved by an air-once celebrity programme as I am a football match. So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise and when it’s in a surprising place.

The reason for spoiling how there would be some moment for the deaf community, though, was for the community of people whose first thought is to complain. Like the audiences for Contact who left their cinema seats to go ask the projectionist what the hell they thought they were doing, losing the sound half a minute into the movie.

So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise that you’ve been warned about. No, sod that. Those Contact audience people were just thick and there are always going to be thick people. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether I’m one of them.

Strictly’s silence made me gasp. Contact’s opening sequence made me hold my breath. Both completely unconsciously.

Mind you, I think I may have held my breath a little during the first Mission: Impossible film when your man is hanging from a rope in that noise-detecting room thing.

And actually, now I think of it, it was the few frames of silence at the very start of Trainspotting that grabbed me.

Clearly, I like silence and must use it more in my writing. Starting with

Los Angeles Tribute

Posted by

My first book was about the television drama “The Beiderbecke Affair” and it was for the British Film Institute. It was in their range of TV Classics and naturally, when you’ve done one, the only thing more likely than the publisher asking if you’d like to do another, is you asking the publisher if you can.

Even more than Beiderbecke, I wanted to write about “Lou Grant”. It didn’t fly and it didn’t fly for a dozen reasons from how the range almost never did US shows, to how the range wasn’t making money. But to make a pitch, I had to do a little bit of research.

That’s chiefly because if you are a publisher and you go to check whether there’s already a book on the proposed subject, you very quickly find that there is. My job was not only to convince the BFI that the topic was of value and that the chance of anyone buying a copy was good, but also that there was a reason for anyone else to do another book about this show.

To my mind, that was damn easy. This 1990s book about the making of “Lou Grant” is really an academic treatise. It sets out to explore whether the show and its “Los Angeles Tribune” newspaper setting was an accurate representation of real journalism at the time. The answer is: more than most. I’ve just saved you reading the book, although I’m denying you some fantastic access the writer had to key people involved.

As part of my own little initial stab at research, though, I created a few Google alerts. Any time something came up about “Lou Grant”, it would be added to the newsreader app I use constantly on my iPhone.

I think I originally created some alerts specifically for certain writers, but I would’ve abandoned that quite quickly. One of my favourite writers on the show is April Smith and if I remember getting alerts about her new novels, I know I got more news stories that contained lines like this: “In April, Smith said…”.

Forget setting an alert for Michelle Gallery. For a brief time I knew more about the opening hours of US art auction houses than is sensible.

But if I dropped those off after the book project failed to go, I somehow left the “Lou Grant” alert in place.

Consequently, over the years since, I have been alerted to the odd thing that some of the writers are doing now, and sometimes various television executives. There’s an excellent series of interviews with Grant Tinker about the show, for instance, and I’d not have found it otherwise.

Mostly I hear about cast, though. It’s through a Google alert that I got to watch Linda Kelsey performing a drama reading somewhere. Apparently it’s through a lack of Google alert that I can’t find that again now I want to show you. Bugger.

But if I found that a couple of years ago and if the Tinker interview is further back than that, there was one thing I could regularly count on my “Lou Grant” Google alert to keep turning up.

Ed Asner.

It seemed like very other week, it cannot be more than every other month, but I would get an alert of a news story about him performing a one-man show on stage somewhere. Or going to perform somewhere. Or maybe campaigning, or doing voiceovers, or just being interviewed an awful lot about the sheer volume of work he had done and the seemingly even greater volume of work he was now doing.

So it was a more of a jolt than I would have imagined to find out this week that he’s just died.

Just died. That’s like yeah, yeah, he just had to go do that dying thing, he’ll back in a minute. And there is a bit of me that would entirely believe that.

When I think about “Lou Grant” it’s usually about the writing, which I loved so much then that it made me want to become a writer. And which I admire so much more now that I am one. But back in the day, watching this series in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was of course the whole I was enjoying. The writing, the acting, the directing, the production, all of it.

Now I look back at it, I’ve a new appreciation for the set design. But I most definitely have a greater appreciation for the acting. It is all so naturalistic that I forgot then and I can still forget now that it is acting at all.

Tell a lie, it isn’t all so naturalistic. Ed Asner is far from that in the first episode. He’s so far from it that you feel he’s in a different series to everyone else. But then for that first edition and perhaps a few after it, he was.

Never before –– and significantly, never since –– has a half-hour sitcom spawned a one-hour drama. But that is what happened. Ed Asner played grumpy Lou Grant for seven years on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then he played the more layered version of him on his own show for five.

So if Asner thinks he’s still in a comedy in episode one, you can understand it. Or you can now. Back then, I may not have consciously registered the different tone between him and the rest of the cast, but I felt it and wondered what was going on.

Oddly, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” never really played in the UK. Even more oddly, one of its sitcom spin-offs did: “Rhoda” was a hit here. So when this “Lou Grant” show started, I hadn’t the faintest idea that this character had any history.

I sound like I’m criticising Asner for how he performed in those early episodes and I suppose I am, but really I’m appreciating what a giant and unprecedented job he was in the middle of pulling off.

There’s a lot else to admire about the acting in the show, but that’s the element that sticks out at me. I thought that this and those constant alerts about new shows was the specific reason that I was so startled by Asner’s death even at age 91.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been thinking about this for days and the reason I’m jolted by his death is bigger than I thought. Any time anyone you’ve even heard of dies, of course you’re sad about it. When that someone is a direct connection back to your childhood, it’s of course more, even when that person has never heard of you.

But beyond that, there’s this. There are actors I like, actors I don’t. Certainly there are performances I relish and ones where I’m glad they didn’t do that to my script. I would not have said that there is any actor who has inspired me. I would not have said Ed Asner has. This show’s writers, certainly. I’m so single-minded-focused on writing that it’s writers or maybe certain producers I know enable certain writers who I credit.

So where I would have told you that I am a writer because of “Lou Grant”, I of course meant the show rather than the character.

Except.

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was beyond a hit in the US. It was such a success that – cutting a story at least in half – CBS gave an on-air commitment to a spin-off for the Lou Grant character. You could dream of such a deal now, but such was the popularity of the comedy that CBS bought 13 episodes of “Lou Grant” straight off.

It was called an on-air commitment, but it was really pay or play. If CBS had aired the first couple of episodes to disastrous ratings, I’m sure they’d have pulled it and just eaten the enormous cost. Whatever their thinking was, the drama that made me a writer got on air and had 13 episodes in which to shake out things like that naturalistic versus more comedic acting.

I owe a debt, then, to the writers of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a series I’ve barely seen and certainly hadn’t the slightest notion of back when I was starting to mount up this bill. Creator/writers Allan Burns and James L. Brooks became familiar names to me on screen through creating “Lou Grant”, along with Gene Reynolds. But CBS had such faith in writers that it had tried to fire Burns and Brooks when they were developing the Mary Tyler Moore series and it was only Grant Tinker’s intervention that prevented them being out on their ears.

Which means score one to Grant Tinker, but this also tells me that really CBS gave an on-air commitment to Ed Asner.

So a show that meant this much to me exists because of an actor’s performance in a series I didn’t know.

I struggle to bring myself to say that therefore I am a writer because of Ed Asner, but it isn’t half looking like that. I thought it was unusual enough to be able to pin one’s career down to a single moment like a TV show, but to pin it to a performance I hadn’t seen, that’s just eye-widening.

Lies ahead

Posted by

I’ve been having trouble with a script I’m writing. It is partly because I appear to be in it and while my cold writer’s head can see that’s necessary to tell this particular story, even I wouldn’t watch something about me.

But then there is also this. The script is about real people. I am a real person, I’m a real person who hasn’t had breakfast yet and is having difficulty remembering whether he’s shaved this fuzzy morning, but I don’t interest me. Beyond wondering why I’m writing my own dialogue, and then why I’m reading it back, I don’t concern me. Instead, it’s everyone else I’m worried about.

I have more research about the two other real people in the story than is even really feasible. Plus above all the facts and the documentation, they were my friends. No question, I’m armed and ready in that sense, but I’m a writer who’s also a journalist: I would give up an eye faster than I would make up a quote for a real person.

And now I’m going to have to make up entire speeches. Ouch, that’s revealing: I’m hiding in tenses and presumably because I am tense. The truth is that I already have made up entire speeches. I’ve written a two-page argument between me and one of these people. And that fight cuts into me, it hurts me, yet still I look at the page thinking he didn’t say that and nobody cares what I didn’t say back.

Except I had a dream the other night in which the late Alan Plater told me, in these precise words, “as long as it’s true, make it up”.

Then it’s like I planned what happened next. The reason I’m telling you this today, apart from how it’s pressing on my mind and I tell you everything, is that a play of Alan’s is to be re-staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London later this year. “Peggy for You” is about Alan’s first agent, Peggy Ramsay, and I read the script last night. Re-read: my copy of the published script turns out to be 21 years old.

It also turns out to be the true story of this eye-poppingly wild and wonderful woman, except it isn’t true at all. Except it is. It is an account of one day of her working life in the 1960s, completely made up, and therefore completely true.

I know because Alan’s introduction to the script says so.

“When I started writing the play, I heard her voice saying: ‘Just make sure it’s a pack of lies, dear.’ And it is. I did no research, but relied totally on a blend of memory, anecdote, myth and legend. The few elements that can be clearly identified could not possibly have happened on the day in question.”

Since Alan is one of the real people in my script, I think I should keep listening to him.

Time series

Posted by

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?

More cents than money

Posted by

Yesterday my YouTube series 58keys qualified to earn money. You need over 1,000 subscribers and overall people must have watched more than 4,000 hours of your videos in the last 365 days. It’s been quite tense this week as I’d near the magic total one day, then the next it would drop back because another 24-hour period had ticked by.

But now it’s over the 4,000, the bells have rung, the lights have flashed and I am in the start of a long process that will see me registered to rake in cash. As best I can calculate it, I can look forward to 55% of $3 for every thousand views I get in the future.

My most popular 58keys video has had something like 8,000 views. In nine months.

Tellin’ you, raking it in.

Just to be clear, I don’t understand at all what really constitutes a view in terms of whether YouTube will hand over money. I think you skip as many YouTube ads as I do, but I’ve no idea when that still counts and when it doesn’t.

Doesn’t matter, not really. It’s not like I’m expecting to run a media empire.

The difference it will actually make, I believe anyway, is that YouTube will promote the series more. That’s always an aim, to reach a bigger audience, and I’m doing it through writing. I present the videos, yes, but I script almost all of them. So since the end of January 2020, I have written about 70 short scripts and they’ve all been produced and they’ve all been watched by someone. Strangers have watched.

Actually, I can tell you this even as it entirely confuses me. It’s true that my most successful video has had 8,000 views, and it’s also true that most range from 200 to about 1,500. But still, YouTube tells me that in the last 365 days my videos have been watched by 49,669 people.

I have to assume 45,000 took one look and switched off, but let’s not go there.

Fifty thousand viewers, however briefly, is simultaneously big to me and I realise also small too. But I’ve profoundly slowly come to realise that what satisfies me is thinking of something and making it happen. Seventy episodes, an unbroken weekly run with some extra specials, fifty thousand viewers.

And my writing is better because of them.

That’s the thing, that’s the difference. Writing does not have to be read or seen, but when it is, I think writers write better. Certainly I do. It’s partly from direct things like comments from viewers, which have seen me doing more visual gags than I realised I was capable of.

But chiefly it’s just the focus. Each week, one video, thought of, written, made, and then seen.

So as small time a YouTuber as I now am, please raise a mug of tea with me to mark the occasion.

Possibly as well to commiserate that yesterday was also the first year anniversary of my finishing the hardest drama script I’ve ever done and it is not one pixel closer to production. And to mark that thanks to BT, I am without internet and I’ll be writing on a website today using the same tin can and piece of string tethering connection I’m using to talk to you.

Unequal pay for writers

Posted by

I was once asked to write something overnight, someone had let somebody down, something had changed, I don’t remember. But I do remember being asked to name my price and I doubled what this company usually paid me.

That’s very nice and I felt very good for about a pixel of a second because while they said yes, they said it with such obvious relief that it was clear they’d have gone far, far higher. For the sake of any claim I make of being a professional writer, I need to tell you that I then billed for that emergency rate for every single project I did for them.

Here’s the thing, though. The writer in me can go into paralysed circles over what I should be paid. The human being in me can go into a rage when, for instance, women writers are being paid less than men.

There’s no but in that one, incidentally and obviously. Women, men, equal pay, not one but, not one question, not one ever.

But.

That’s about minimums. And I’ve been in conversations this week where I think there was a belief that it should apply to maximums, too. There was definitely a moment where an idea of capping writers’ pay so no one could get more than some amount came up and wasn’t shot down instantly. These were writers suggesting this and there were circumstances, it didn’t come out of nowhere, but I said to them and I’ll say to you, no.

No caps. Every other bugger wants to limit our pay, we can’t enable them to do it.

There’s something British about this. I’ve been thinking about it all week and it reminds me of how in the UK, you don’t tend to haggle. The price is the price, you pay it or you don’t, it’s not that common to negotiate. I’m the same, I tried it once over a fridge or something and got nowhere.

Anyway. I think the logic was that if you are writing a one-hour drama for primetime television then it’s the same job for everyone. Takes the same time, is physically the same amount of words and pages, of course it should earn the same money.

I’m too polite to say this aloud myself, so please take the rudest word you can think of and prefix it with the phrase fucking bollocks.

Men and women, yes, of course, you must not, you cannot be paid more or less just because of which genitals you happen to have. Age, too, I’d definitely agree that a writer’s age is no more an important factor in fee negotiations than their shoe size.

I hesitate over experience, a bit. There is an increased rate for writers when they are experienced and there are good reasons for it, good and practical reasons, but I’ve also known writers who’ve written for years and just aren’t all that great at it. Still, experience, if I don’t back that as vehemently as I do the men/women equal pay issue, I’m not against experienced writers being paid more.

Where I will stand and if necessary fall is over this presumption that writing a one-hour drama is the same regardless of who you are.

Let’s say that you are not a writer, you’re a producer and you are now producing a series. You commission me to write one episode and you commission Phoebe Waller-Bridge to write another. There are immediately, instantly two very clear things you and I know both about these two episodes.

First, with deep and miserable regret, we both know that her episode is going to be better than mine. She’s a better writer than I will ever be, although I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try.

Second, you also know that she’ll be paid more than I will.

Of course she will be and of course she should be. She’s better than I am. I can’t comprehend an argument where I should be paid the same as her. She’s better, her script will be better, the show will be better, it is worth it to you as a series producer to pay more for her work.

That’s where people get this wrong, I think, and it’s where writers get it wrong, I’m afraid. We talk a lot about how important we are to drama because, well, there ain’t any drama without writers. But at the same time we deeply undervalue ourselves and where minimum rates are fair, maximums are not. It is worth a show paying more for certain writers, just as on a pretty infinitely smaller scale, it was worth it to that company to pay me more when they needed something written overnight.

Writers do feel undervalued and we are, certainly. There are actors who claim to have invented your characters, for instance. Even good actors are more likely to thank a director than a writer, although actually I get that: by the time the cast is on board, writers can be gone to the next project. Of course you’re going to bond more with the people you actually work with.

I just think writers undervalue themselves too. And in making a case for fees that assumes all writers are the same, are of the same talent and worth, is not standing up for our rights. It’s more like being colonised.

I think this is the killer argument and apparently I’m wrong as writers I talked with this week were not even injured by it. Still, it’s this and it convinces me at least: if you don’t pay a great writer more, some other show will and you’ll lose her.

Missing Holby City

Posted by

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.

Stupid count

Posted by

For six weeks now, I’ve been counting the days until today when I could say to you that I’ve read 2,000 scripts –– and I’ve blown it. I’m not sure why I was proud enough of this trivial fact that I wanted to boast at you about, but seemingly I did and seemingly I was going to preen for some reason. Instead, on slightly closer examination, I have to tell you that I’ve miscounted and today’s script was only the 1,899th.

Yes, I have just filed my tax return. No, I’m not now terrified at all.

Look, I’ve read a lot more than 2,000 scripts in my life. I love reading them, I always have, it’s just that on December 23, 2017, I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site which suggested reading a script every day. I can see me now, at this keyboard, thinking yep, good idea, I’ll do that. Since then I’ve read at least one script every single day and after the first year of it I wrote about the ten lessons I felt I’d learned from what I believed was 620 but who knows now, could’ve been 12.

I keep a list of what I’ve read and after the first while, also a link to where I read it if it’s online. It’s from examining that list that I discovered the miscount, but I was examining the list in order to hopefully be useful and I can still do a bit of that. I can recommend scripts and moreover, I can recommend sources for scripts. Let me do two sources and two specific scripts from those sources.

So while I see no reason you should ever trust me again about numbers, I believe that of my 1,899 in-a-row script reading, 318 were from my favourite site, TVwriting. I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t many, many more because that is my go-to site when I just want something good to read.

Another 105 were from the BBC Writersroom script library. I can’t say I’ve cleaned the BBC out since if I disliked a script to a show’s first episode, I skipped the rest. But still, I open that library page and it’s sometimes hard to find something I haven’t read. Certainly I’ve vacuumed up the entire radio drama, radio comedy and television comedy scripts.

I will press on, though, even beyond 2,000 when I finally get there in at most another 100 days. And let me offer this as another lesson from reading scripts: I may have read some stinkers, but there amazing pieces of writing just waiting for us all online.

The internet’s faults are legion, but there are gems, too. Including these two. It is completely unfair to pick out two scripts but no one said writing has to be fair, or at least nobody any good.

If you fancy reading a film screenplay, relish Man Up by Tess Morris, which I read on the BBC Writersroom on both January 5, 2018 and August 28, 2019.

Or if, like me, you’re more of a television drama nut, go for the pilot episode of Veronica Mars, by Rob Thomas, which I read on TVwriting on May 31, 2018.

I suppose you can call this educational reading and when I started this lark there was certainly an aim of improving my own scriptwriting. No question, it worked. But also no question, I read scripts for immense pleasure and if you don’t already do that too, I hope you will.

Just don’t bother counting them, it’s too difficult.