Zoning out

This is the earliest I have ever written to you on a Friday morning and it is also the latest. I’m writing at about 6am but I’m in Los Angeles and now realise that it’s about 2pm where I usually am in the UK.

Only, I thought I was extremely conscious of time zones because around half of the people I most work with are on the East Coast. Usually I can therefore deliver work to them early and to UK places right on time. Easy.

Except the UK being eight hours ahead and the East coast five hours, now I’m behind everybody and everything.

I’m shocked at how instantly I became adjusted to LA time. But I’ve done this before, you’ve done it before, I don’t know why this trip is different.

It is, though. This won’t sound like a good thing but it feels great: I feel like I’m in a bubble beneath everything. That’s definitely the word, beneath: the rest of the world seems to be going on above me as well as many hours ahead.

I should find that abhorrent and even writing it to you feels wrong, feels a betrayal of my usual self. And it’s not as if I’m on holiday: I am working as much as ever, just in Santa Monica. Whenever I’m not in meetings, I’m watching the clock trying to figure out how to fit the next thing.

So there I am, clock watching – in the best way, I’m not wishing this time away – and still I forget time zones.

I’d like to tell you something else I’ve forgotten, too, and I think it might be related. For just these few days I’m here, I’ve stopped worrying about Brexit. I’m working with someone who is just genuinely optimistic about life and as he stands there in Santa Monica sunshine, it’s impossible to not be lifted.

Mind you, I’m in the kind of gorgeous hotel you’d reject in order to have enough money to eat. For the first time in my life, I got on the plane in London and turned left. Later today, unless this time zone failure of mine reoccurs, I’m meeting some of my heroes.

And all of this is happening because I write. The things I think, the words in my head, are the direct and specific reason that I’m here. I’ve even been told that it was a Self Distract blog post that sealed the deal.

Writing is a scary career and no one can ever recommend it, but if you happen to know any of the teachers at my secondary school who laughed at me, do please give them a funny look from me.

Not what I was expecting to talk to you about

Posted by William Gallagher

Grief, I need tea. Would you like one? I think there’s two teabags left, though oddly they’re called “tagged teabags”. I don’t know if that means they bleep when you steal them from the hotel or whether they’re just really well catalogued, but let’s have them anyway.

Slightly dizzy. I’m in a Manchester hotel and there was a fire alarm: did you hear it? So loud. Made louder by it being at 06:25. Made louder still by the klaxon being joined by an automated voice shouting that we had to evacuate the building, this is no drill, warp core breach in thirty seconds. I may be exaggerating.

Actually, that’s a horrible thought. I grabbed yesterday’s clothes and joined the crowd going down the stairs. Before I’d finished dressing, though, another – er, tenant? Member of the public? Civilian? I’m not sure what to call her. Another hotel guest, thank you. Another hotel guest was coming back up the stairs and calling out that it’s okay, apparently this was all a mistake. What if she were the one exaggerating? What if she was out and out lying – and we should all have continued to go out?

Why didn’t she tell me this four floors earlier?

I want you to know that I was very good and I left all my luggage in the room as you should. (What if she were working with a team of hotel thieves?) I don’t want you to know that my first thought was that I could be outside for hours and would be writing to you on my Apple Watch. No, actually, do think that, do know that: my potential last thoughts were of you.

And of the workshop I’m doing at 10am.

I did one here yesterday for the Federation of Entertainment Unions: about twenty people from Equity, the NUJ, the Musicians’ Union and the Writers’ Guild. I’m doing another one on a different topic today, different set of people, also for the FEU. I think yesterday’s went well, certainly I had a great time, but I know it went easier than ever. The venue, Band on the Wall, has the regular projector and screen I need for presenting but they also have an Apple TV.

Now, that’s two references to Apple in one go, so I’m improving. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve presented via one of these boxes – and the first time was the evening before. That was a practice run in the hotel room: I brought our own Apple TV, meaning Angela couldn’t watch Netflix at home, sorry, and tried it out on the hotel TV set.

If you’re interested in this stuff then I’ll tell you this is my new ideal and I will always bring an Apple TV with me: it beats having to hope you’ve brought the right cables for a projector you’ve not seen before. It also means I could roam the room with that iPad. All really useful stuff for me, so useful that I love it. That the venue had its own, just icing.

Only, the hotel TV set. I am a TV drama nut and yet this is the first hotel I’ve stayed in for about the last three years that I’ve even switched the telly on. The last time was also in Manchester, I was appearing on BBC Breakfast and switched it on so I could watch the start of the show in my room and get even more scared.

It’s even longer since I used the phone in a hotel room. That used to be the thing, didn’t it? Get into a new hotel room, phone home or phone wherever you’re going next, then one of you checks out the bathroom and the other tries the TV. Face it, when you’re in Stereotype City, it’s the man who switches on the telly and the woman who checks out the bathroom. Both use the phone.

Or did. Now look at us, at all of us. We bring our own phones with us. We don’t bring our own TV sets, except we do. When I’d finished rewriting the first of these two presentations on my iPad, I kicked back and relaxed – by watching the same iPad.

I watched Lou Grant on it. This is the journalism drama that made me want to be a writer and I can quote you lines, I accidentally use lines from it, 35 years after it aired. Lou Grant has finally come out on DVD. This was the one show I longed for the most when I was reviewing DVDs, when shiny discs were a thing, and now it’s out as nobody’s buying DVDs anymore. I bought it. Of course I bought it. And I’ll buy season 2 when it comes out in August.

Only, I’m doing that because it’s Lou Grant and it’s special to me and I want it to be a success, I want all five seasons released. When I was doing the disc reviewing lark, I would regularly hear from people who said they refused to buy a TV show until the entire series was released. They didn’t want to spend their money buying season 1 if season 2 were never brought out. People are idiots. You like the show enough to buy it, buy it. You don’t buy it because you hope the studio will release all five seasons first, you’re not really attuned to how this works.

I’m buying the DVDs to do my tiny part in making the sales enough to warrant doing more. This is a genuinely special show, not just to me, for all manner of television history reasons and for how tremendously well done it is.

But it’s special to me. I watch the show now as a writer with, if not experience then at least age behind me, I watch it now having been a professional critic, but I also watch it as the 13-year-old I was then. My job today is standing up in front of established actors, musicians, writers and journalists. I watch Lou Grant in this hotel room and there is an extra commentary track in my head with my 13-year-old self wondering at how I got here.

My 50-year-old self is wondering why it took me so long to get here but that’s another story.

God in heaven.

I’ve just realised, saying this to you I’ve just realised: I am now the age that the character Lou Grant was at the start of this series.

Anyway.

Here’s a thing. Lou Grant is at last out on DVD, right? I’ve already got the first three seasons on iTunes. (They didn’t release the fourth and fifth: I check regularly.) It came out on VHS once: about three episodes and I have two of them. Speaking of VHS, I have a huge filing cabinet draw with about 30, possibly 40 VHS tapes that I recorded off-air or that friends did. It’s missing one episode: Violence, from 1981. That missing one killed me, for years.

It doesn’t kill me now because I’ve got it. I will buy the DVDs as they hopefully continue to come out and I will buy the iTunes versions if they do, but the hunt for this missing episode took me down some interesting alleys. It’s a fourth-season episode so it has not been released officially in any form and consequently I don’t feel 100% bad about this. But that interesting alley has the whole season 4. And 5. And 1, and 2. It only has about half of season 3, but that’s okay, I’ve got all of that one on iTunes.

So I’m in a hotel, drinking tea with you, head still a little fuzzy from the fire alarm, and in a moment I will have to work on my iPad. But at this moment, right here under my fingers, right here in my possession, this one device has all 114 episodes of Lou Grant on it.

Call me ridiculous, because I am, but I left my luggage but I grabbed this iPad.

Lou Grant on iPad

I’m not here

Posted by William Gallagher

When you get this, I’ll be in France on a trip that took detective skills and twenty years of work.

It’s my 20th wedding anniversary on 3 August and I will be with Angela Gallagher in Paris. We honeymooned there and that’s where the detective work came in.

I was sure the hotel had changed its name and anyway, I wasn’t certain what it was. I remembered a shop on the same street, though, so I got out Apple Maps and Google Streetview and I searched Paris for where we had honeymooned.

Hours of searching, phoning hotels in the city, struggling with my schoolboy French, I did it all and booked our room.

Then, late one night, Angela couldn’t sleep. She went into our living room, crossed to the shelves and took out a book to read. A piece of paper fell out. A letter she’d used as a bookmark.

Twenty years ago.

The letter was the original booking confirmation for the hotel.

And with my detective work, I had got us a room in the right part of Paris, the right hotel, the right floor and just two doors away from where we were in 1994.

Weird to think that the hotel had stayed there all this time. (It has changed its name but only slightly; it’s old name is now prefixed by a different company’s one.) Very strange to see the place from Apple Maps and Google Maps, neither of which were imagined or maybe imaginable back then.

And very weird to think that amongst so much change in the world and in my life, Angela is still with me.