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Come back to me

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Some 19 years ago in the last week of January, 2004, I spent an entire afternoon sitting alone in a Radio Times studio in London while BBC Radio stations took turns calling me. Back then, they were calling over a broadcast-quality ISDN line and while I can’t remember how many stations there were, my job was to be on a show talking about Radio Times.

Specifically, RT that week had one of those countdown features, this time the Top Ten Spookiest Shows Ever or something like that. I presume I had worked on the feature, I know I was the only one available that day, but it’s all a bit fuzzy. I’ve just spent a quite happy 20 minutes Googling to find the barely-remembered cover.

RT Cover 2004 with borderFlash forward to this week and on Tuesday I got to do it again, from my Birmingham office and over FaceTime audio. Two decades later, I am clearly the man in demand. But it felt like I was that day because 11 BBC Local Radio stations and 1 BBC national station wanted my opinion about the return of Fawlty Towers.

Hang on. Not true. They wanted someone’s opinion, they each wanted a way to talk about this news, to get their listeners talking about it, and they wanted an extra voice in the mix. I am nothing if not an extra voice and I don’t care how I ended up getting to do this, I got to do it and I relished it.

So that’s very nice for me and also it’s not as if I believe my opinion has any particular value. Yet it looks very strongly like I’m going to give it to you anyway.

And yes, here it comes. If the question is whether Fawlty Towers should come back, the answer is there is not one single pixel of a chance you can possibly guess until it’s made – but that won’t stop us talking about it until, in my case anyway, we get sore throats.

Really the only key thing, I thought, was over the issue that it appears Connie Booth is not involved. She and John Cleese wrote the original, I’ve read the scripts, she’s tremendous and seemingly she isn’t writing this one.

Other than that, what I realised from saying this stuff over and over is why the announcement was made now. There are practically no details, certainly not any indication of where the new Fawlty Towers will be screened – and that’s why it was announced this week.

The makers are shopping this show around the networks and the streamers, and they are now able to point to the mass of attention the news got. There is public interest, there is public demand, this show is guaranteed to get high ratings. That’s what they will be saying to the streamers and they are right.

For episode 1.

Everyone will watch the first episode of a new Fawlty Towers, it’s then up to the show to keep us coming back.

Apparently last year there were 599 new scripted comedy and dramas on American television alone. That’s an unimaginable number and, possibly more significantly, an unwatchable one. You and I will never even hear of most of those shows and simply getting our attention at all must be murderously difficult.

Fawlty Towers got our attention instantly.

I think that is why shows are brought back, because they have a built-in audience and it’s sufficiently big that the return is also brought to the attention of new audiences.

Only, I do think shows finish for a reason. They do come to an end, they do often fizzle away. To work anew, they have to become a new show.

And I don’t think we want that. What we really want, always, is not a sequel, not a continuation. We want the first one again, we want to be back when we hadn’t seen that first one yet and it was all to come. We want to recapture whatever it was we were as well as what the show is.

It’s impossible for a show to live up to how we remember a beloved original, decades after it ended.

But it can be better. All that time ago in 2004, we had no idea that it would be just the next year when Doctor Who would be back and not just living up to the original, but exceeding it.

Don’t write this, write that

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I cannot count and wouldn’t even want to try counting how many times I’ve asked someone in a workshop to write something — and they haven’t. They’ve written something else instead.

If I’d said this to you last week, I’d have said it is always fantastic, it is always an absolute thrill. I can think of writers where even as I ask them to do something, I am secretly willing them to write something different, just to see what they come up with.

Today, I will say exactly the same. But I didn’t appreciate until this week that it is fantastic and thrilling for a really key reason I hadn’t even noticed.

It’s because, in all these workshops and with all these writers, their intention is solely to write well. Nobody is ignoring me just to be rude, nobody is dismissing my ideas, it’s just that what I’ve said has somehow sparked off something else and they have to write it, they have to.

There is no possible way that any of this could be anything less than joyously wonderful.

But.

These writers also know that they can do it. We’re practically playing in a workshop, they’re not commissioned, they don’t have a real deadline behind my giving them either ten minutes or until I get bored watching them write.

They also know, just as I do, that plenty of times what they write won’t work, somehow just won’t work out. And part of being a writer is knowing when to throw something away.

But then a thing came up this week about writing outside workshops, a thing which I suppose was also about ignoring everyone and writing your own thing, your own way, but it wasn’t joyous.

It was amateur.

I may be overthinking this, could be overreacting, but a writer basically wanted you to know he is a rebel. He didn’t say it, didn’t use that word, but the implication and the thrust of it all was that he’s a rebel writer, and though you or I ordinary people are not, that’s fine, that’s fine, not everyone can be rebellious, it’s not our fault that we aren’t as good as him.

No, I’m going too far there. I’d best step away from what he said because I’m being unfair, I got all of that from a word or two in a long piece that I happened to disagree with.

Let me ignore him, then, and instead focus on this amateur versus professional point of mine. What he put me in mind of is the opinion that the reason a given writer is not published is that publishers have closed ranks, that readers just don’t get him — it’s usually a him — and that ultimately he’s an undiscovered genius.

Could be.

Isn’t.

But could be.

The idea is that therefore, any writer who is discovered, who is published, has bowed to the system, has given in, is writing what the masses like.

The trouble is, you can’t do that. You cannot set out to write what the masses will like because you are wrong, you are always wrong. By the time you’ve written it and it’s been published, the masses have long moved on to something else.

Unless you’re writing about zombies, which for some unfathomable reason just will not go away. I’ve begged.

But say it is possible to somehow write what the masses like, say you can catch just the right fad or something and you can deliver what the publishing industry wants. You’re then exactly the same as every other writer who manages to do that and then there is exactly zero reason why you should be read instead of them.

You can’t and shouldn’t even try to write what you think readers will like. You and I could have a very serious coffee trying to figure out the line here, but I also hesitate about editing the way readers tell you to. I can think of a book I relished where the first three chapters were dreadful, because those were the ones that had been workshopped.

Yet despite all of this, I don’t believe you can ignore the audience. You can’t aim at them, you can’t change to suit an imaginary audience in the hope of getting a real one. But writing is not for writers, it is for readers and if they are not in your mind in some way, I think your writing becomes self-indulgent.

There are a thousand reasons to write just for yourself, with no thought of publication, and yet even then, if I do that I still have to point the writing toward an audience because otherwise I’ll just meander along aimlessly.

Okay, I’m writing to you right now and you may yet think I’m meandering.

I’m trying to find a sentence I can write here that begins “But”.

Anyway.

I don’t believe writing for an audience means giving in to the system. I do believe you have to write for yourself, but you have to do it with the intention that there will be a reader at the end.

I like the sound of being a rebel writer. I think writers have to be rebellious.

It’s just that if you regard yourself as a rebel simply because you’re not published, because the world doesn’t understand you, then you’re not a rebel writer, you’re probably just a shit one.

One law

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This is a side point, but I know you know the phrase “one law for the rich, another for the poor”, or something of that sort. It’s not like that’s an alien concept today. But it’s also not the original quote.

Neither is this, but it’s closer in spirit to the — presumably — French phrase that Anatole France said. Anatole France being of course the French philospher whose work I’ve admired since I found him in a Google search a moment ago.

Anyway.

The quote I know, based on his French original, goes thisaway: “One law for rich and poor alike, which prohibits them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.”

I think that is so astute. The law is the same for all of us, but it doesn’t affect the rich. Again, hardly an alien concept today. But the more familiar version, the one rule for them and one for us edition, lacks the nastiness of the original. The two rules version is trite, I think, where “one law” is bitter.

And I have thought this since long before there even was a Google. In fact, I’ve thought it since it was said in a 1976 episode of The Tomorrow People, written by Roger Price.

It’s just that I thought it again on Wednesday night, though not because anything bad or unlawful was happening. I was at a Royal Television Society screening of the new ITV drama “Nolly”, written by Russell T Davies. Short version: it’s perfection. Slightly longer version: it’s perfection about Noele Gordon, 1970s and 1980s star of Crossroads. I wrote an episode of that soap’s revial in the early 2000s and part of the pleasure was in how, even if I wouldn’t say I had been a fan, I would regularly say I defend the original soap against its many detractors.

Detractors who do have a point, to be fair. But still, I lived next door to one of the cast and I’m from Birmingham where the soap was set. It was rubbish, but it was our rubbish.

Anyway.

The screening was followed by a Q&A with the cast and crew, including Russell T Davies. And this is where I want to join a dot, if a really tenuous one. For some reason, the subject came up about how he writes dialogue and that led Davies into a brief aside about – I’m paraphrasing – the insanity of separating out writing into parts. He gave the example of people who say they’re going to work on character now, for instance, where in truth character is dialogue is story is dialogue is character.

“It’s all one thing,” he said. I’m parrot phrasing.

When someone whose writing you admire says the same thing you think, it doesn’t matter that he says it better, he’s still saying it and you feel vindicated.

I have a friend who sees dialogue as — his words — “a tasty extra” that you do last of all. Write the script, then go back to work on what words the characters say.

I think you can imagine what words I say to that. This is a family show so I’ll let you think of the absolute rudest word you can, so long as you promise to prefix it with the clarifying phrase “fucking bollocks”.

To be fair, I think that friend believes dialogue comes last because he wants to put it off. We all have things we can’t do, that we can’t write, and plenty of novelists are better known for their description than for their dialogue. ‘Course, my friend is a scriptwriter, so he’s screwed.

Davies did also say, in one sense, that dialogue comes last. He said that you’ve been thinking about the characters for so long, once you get to writing the script, the dialogue just comes out.

I won’t disagree with him, I don’t believe you can ever disagree with someone else’s process since it’s their process, not yours, except obviously when they think dialogue is a tasty extra. But that bit about thinking about the characters for long gives me pause. Quite a short pause, I suppose, because for me I find the characters in the writing. So I tend to set off down that script road, aguably too soon, arguably too quickly, but I go there and if it’s rubbish I turn back.

But then that’s my rule, you may have a different one.

The backside dilemma

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I’ve been working on the Writers’ Guild Awards for just about a year, so I got to go to the event last Monday. I will never show you pictures because they are startlingly visible evidence that I was even more ill than I thought.

Even so, even being ill, even being there not because I was nominated for anything but because it was work – I suppose it was work – the Writers’ Guild Awards event is the place to be. It is the room to get in if you possibly can and, if anything, I thought this year’s was the best of a remarkable run.

And although it didn’t win its category, “Slow Horses” by Will Smith was nominated and I am actually proud of that. I didn’t write that excellent show, I wasn’t a judge in that category, but I was the one who entered it into the awards.

But then, it’s such a strong show and the Writers’ Guild Awards ceremony is about the best British writing, it had to be entered, it had to be considered.

Consequently that wasn’t me, that was just necessary.

And although I worked on the awards for a year, obviously so did many people. Yet when it came to the night itself, all my jobs were long done and consequently out of all the people working there, I was the sole one who could relax with nothing to do.

I did end up with the odd task but still, the actual event on the night was neither one pixel better or worse because I was there.

So I had a great time, a really tremendous time, and the night was a success. Plus so far in 2023 I can point to various things I’ve learned already, various things I’ve made happen or just plain made, I can think of people I’ve met and things I’ve done.

I suppose.

Well, more than suppose, just before you and I started talking I actually made a list for myself of what I’ve done so far.

But.

I had to write that list because it still feels like we’re only just back working after Christmas and that nothing has happened, that I’ve done nothing. For some reason I am finding 2023 murderously difficult to get going in. Today is January 20 and suddenly, this very second writing to you, what occurs to me is that it’s therefore eight weeks since I had a haircut.

That’s my January. An absence of barbershops. It’s not an accomplishment.

So here’s the thing. Without question, I need to get up off my backside and bloody do something. Except I’m a writer, so what I need to do is sit that backside right down and write.

You see the dilemma.

Give it a reset

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Take a look at this, please.

Fame script excerptI’m trying to see from your face whether you recognise any of that, but all I can see is that you’re looking a lot younger than me. I will try to still like you.

Anyway, if you do recognise it, I guarantee that you only recognise the first 17 words of the speech, not a single syllable after them. And you’re not really reading those 17, you’re hearing Debbie Allen saying them.

It’s the Fame speech. I think Allen delivers those lines in the opening title sequence of every one of that show’s 136 episodes. Certainly it’s in most of them, and I’ve just recently learned that she does different versions of it for some of the different seasons of the series.

Debbie Allen is this remarkable talent, a true and admirable star in so many fields, but curiously I don’t think her delivery of that speech works in any version other than the first one. The one where it wasn’t this famous line being delivered practically like a quotation, instead where it was just a single line of dialogue in an hour script.

Specifically in Fame, season 1, episode 1, “Metamorphosis” by Christopher Gore.

Imagine writing a line that an unfathomably enormous number of people remember vividly, decades later.

Gore wrote the 1980 film, which is frankly better: it’s less about fame, more about failure, and it stands up very well. He also wrote the pilot episode for the series and I understand it went through a lot of changes before it even got to the draft script I’ve just read. The changes were all to help make a series out of a movie, and I don’t know how many other hands were involved.

Nonetheless, “Metamorphosis” is different to both the film and the rest of the series. I’d say there are three Fames – the film, this pilot script and then the rest of the series – but don’t get me started on how many versions there are. There’s also been a TV reboot, a film remake, and countless stage productions.

If nothing else, they surely milked that idea dry.

Only, as fond as I was of the show’s early years when I saw them in the 1980s and how I’ve mostly enjoyed reading – so far – 21 of the scripts – I think it’s an idea that ran out of milk really soon.

I wrote about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome a few months ago, just a couple of pieces for the programme for their production of the stage version. In one of them, though, I offered that the reason the series is remembered as being brighter and lighter than the film is that it had whole seasons to tell its stories, not just two hours.

That could have been true and certainly I convinced myself, writing that while deep in COVID. But now reading the scripts, seeing some episodes, Fame seems to be an archetype of a certain 1970s/80s US TV format that I don’t like. It’s the type usually described as having a reset switch. Huge emotional upheaval happens in an episode, but it’s all fine at the end. That kind of thing.

Not that Fame has really huge emotional upheaval in the series, but does land some very good moments and they are then forgotten.

Today we might still know a guest star is never going to be heard of again, but what happens in one episode of a series has an impact that lasts. I’ve always thought that was better than the reset switch, and I’ve always thought it for a dozen reasons, but this week I’ve got a new one.

The reset switch is meant to mean that everything goes back to normal at the end of each episode. But in effect, what that inevitably means is that every episode is starting from scratch next time. There’s no follow through, so there’s no momentum, so each time it’s right, let’s do it again.

I think that’s why Fame seems, to me, to struggle for stories very early on its run. Some episodes seem more forced than others, more “this’ll do” than anything else. Apparently there is one right toward the end of the run where the studio asked whether the producers really wanted to do this story and the producers said it’s this or it’s a two-week production shut down while we try to think of something good.

Still, even with a reset-switch Fame, you get episodes like “A Tough Act to Follow” by Virginia Aldridge where I haven’t got the script, I haven’t seen it recently, but I still remember its punch from 40 years ago.

So I’m not saying that a reset-switch series can’t be any good, I’m just now thinking that it is bloody murder to keep coming up with entirely standalone stories where you’ve got to take us from everything-is-peachy and on to everything-is-peachy-again. I don’t think you can raise the stakes as high when you’re being pulled down at the start and the end.

Curiously, there was one key series that famously and very noticeably ignored the reset switch. I’m sure there were others in the transition phrase between the 1980s and our present golden age of television drama, but one was noticeable because of its background and where its writers came from.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. If you’re thinking I couldn’t go further away from Fame if I tried, I see your point, but Deep Space Nine was the fourth Star Trek series and the preceding three were all primarily reset-switch ones. Very famously against the demands of the studio making it, Deep Space Nine kept on having good people do bad things and living with the consequences. There were consequences. They lasted throughout the run of the series, they weren’t tied off in a neat bow at the end of the hour.

And a key writer in making that happen, in even taking on his studios in protracted fights, was Ira Steven Behr. Yes. He wrote for Fame and then he showran Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Mind you, this week I learned that Fame’s showrunner, William Blinn, went on to write Prince’s movie, “Purple Rain”, and that now seems a bigger jolt.

I think I’ll shut up here, before I admit to you that in the 1980s, I had the most enormous crush on one of the Fame dancers. Phew. Nearly admitted that.

Pipped to the post

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During the pandemic, I did a lot of interviewing of people and there was one man who got quite anxious before the call. He was a very good, very interesting interviewee and I’m sure he’s rarely anxious, but he was then and for one single reason.

The time.

He told me that he had been on a Zoom meeting that was overruning and all the way through, he could see the clock on his computer and knew I would phone at exactly the time I said. Exactly. And that because we were all in lockdown, because we were all on computers, my exact time would be the same as his exact time.

We talked about that after the interview. How it used to be that you didn’t assume people would turn up on the stroke of whatever time it was, since your clock and their watch would be a bit out.

He was right, that’s gone now. And I like it: if I arrange to meet or to phone you at a certain time, you can be certain I will. On the button. So our use of internet time servers to regulate our computers and our phones and our smartwatches suits me fine.

Only.

On New Years’ Eve, we were watching BBC1 for the countdown to 2023 and because we were watching on the BBC iPlayer, it was late. We’d done the “Watch Live” bit, we weren’t ten minutes behind on demand, but the time it took that countdown to go from BBC1 through the internet to our smart TV, it was a significant delay.

And it always is. I’m shocked how little I listen to BBC Radio 4 these days, but I know it still has the pips to mark the top of the hour — and I know they’re wrong. It used to be that you couldn’t broadcast those pips under any circumstances other than the top of the hour, so dramas that used them had to find some reason to cut away before the full pip time signal was given.

Now you can hear it anytime you like on the BBC iPlayer, because the playback from that is not a discrete recording of any individual show, it is a time-based slice of BBC output. If you want the 18:30 comedy, you get it, plus anything else aired from about 18:30 to about 19:00, sometimes a little before and after.

So here we are with instant access to everything. Here are major global news operations like the BBC, still just occasionally putting out this fiction of the time being what they say it is.

Mind you, you know the BBC started its coverage of the 2023 countdown at exactly the right time, it was internet connections and latency and all sorts of things that delayed at my end.

Whereas CNN just cocked it up entirely through human error. They were playing live music, they forgot the countdown. There was some issue with a technical problem they hadn’t bothered to fix, but that’s just more human error in the end.

And I don’t know why, but in this age of picosecond precision, as much as I like that, I enjoyed hearing about CNN. I know it wasn’t deliberate but, still, good on them.

Top Ten favourite scripts of 2022

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

Anyway. Now, read on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I expect it will be in 2023.

Everywhere

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I was as startled as you by the death of Christine McVie, but I also didn’t notice that she left Fleetwood Mac for – hang on, checking again – about 15 years. Simply did not notice.

That’s pretty bad, even for a man. But she was with the band, then later she was with the band, and in between it seems they did bugger-all. I’m going to let myself off.

And instead remember that McVie grew up about six pixels away from where I am right now in Birmingham. And instead also remember that I only recently got into her 2017 album with Lindsey Buckingham, the imaginatively titled “Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie” album. But I really got into it.

Plus there is this. It might be a running joke for anyone who has ever worked in a radio station, but I used to call out “they’re playing our song” whenever any one of about 11,000 tracks were played. Something like 11,000, or however many singles there were in the BHBN Hospital Radio library where I met my wife.

There were actually special ones in that library, though. I will forever remember having to carry a show on past time because the next presenter was running around the library trying to gather up their singles while I was playing out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.

I’ll also remember who faded out John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” before the end and so wrecked the entire narrative structure of that song.

But maybe mostly, I’ll remember “Everywhere“. By Christine McVie.

It was released in November 1987 when I was 22 and initially it was in heavy rotation on every station because it was new and because it was good. Later it became a favourite for a reason I’m half proud of, half not.

There is a skill in talking up to the vocals on a song, to knowing just by sense and feel when the lyrics will start and so being able to speak up to that instant while making it sound like that’s just when you would’ve finished and shut up anyway.

It’s just not a skill that has any use outside of a radio station. Since I’d rather listen to the music than to a presenter, I’m not 100% convinced it has any use inside of a radio station either.

Nonetheless, you could either do it or not, and the fact that every single record in the library had a note of how many seconds the intro lasts, was no help.

Except in Everywhere, it got a little trickier and therefore — by some measure, anyway — more satisfying.

For although Everywhere has a 22-second intro, its then first lyric — the very soft “Calling out your name” — lasts for exactly 1 second and is followed by another 6 seconds before the vocals really get going. So you can talk up to the 22-second mark, you can say a huge amount up to there, take a one-second breath, then drop in a 6-second station ident.

Make even a one-second mistake and you crash the lyrics, it sounds awful. Granted, get it perfectly right and you’re still talking over an excellent song and so you sound awful.

But it was irresistible. The average speaking speed of a presenter is 3 words per second, so you could say 66 words up to the first lyric — even if you didn’t begin until you started the track. And you could then say 18 words in the gap, if you didn’t have a cart with a pre-recorded ident to hand.

Of all her accomplishments in writing, I suspect Christine McVie didn’t even know about this one.

Plus while I remembered all of this about the radio station, I did just have to go listen to Everywhere to check those timings. The memory of the radio work is faded, the music remains clear.

It is astounding to me that I can just listen to it now, to call up pretty much anything I want, certainly anything I’ve heard of, and listen immediately.

And listen without some prat like me firing off a jingle at 23 seconds into the track.

Balls

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Dear Diary, I am 57 years old and I have just watched a football match for the first time. “Dear William,” replies Diary, “you were eating chocolate cake at a Royal Television Society awards dinner while they played some match on screens that you didn’t look at. It doesn’t count.”

So it remains that my only experience of football is the first bit of a game at some ground where a team played another team and as I walked in, the entire crowd sensed my expertise and turned to me like a wall. As soon as I was done with whatever radio work I was doing, I turned away from them and escaped.

I do wonder if I’m missing out by having this total absence of sport. During that RTS dinner, a waitress standing behind me yelped – actually yelped – with excitement at whatever was happening on the screen. I asked her what I’d missed, she explained and I understood, I just didn’t feel it. I was excited meeting Ellie Simmonds at the dinner, but while I wouldn’t say this to her, I was thinking yeah, yeah, sport, amazing, now what about Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s possible I did say that.

It was not the longest conversation I’ve ever had, but it was work. My wife Angela Gallagher and I were tasked with briefing each of the presenters at the awards, which took six to ten seconds per person, then fetching them from their tables when they were needed to get ready. It was probably a total of twenty minutes spread out over the evening, but it was work and so it was bliss. A really gorgeous dinner, a really great crowd, and instead of sitting there at a table all evening, I got to run around the whole place in a tuxedo. Since I believe fervently that it is better to be crew than passenger, it was wonderful.

And I got to see Angela at work. I can’t explain this, but given a task, Angela switched from dinner guest to a kind of producer-mode. It was like a light switch had been thrown and seeing her in action, even on the same task I was doing right there with her, even in this smallest part we were of the event, it was fantastic.

It also wasn’t sport and when you and I started today, I’d intended to tell you a sports story in which I sound like an idiot. Let me see if I can turn that around at all.

Follow. It’s some time in the 1980s or 1990s, it’s a Saturday or possibly a Sunday, and I’m working at BBC Radio WM for a man who actually scared me but I can’t remember his name. It’s possible that I am not as scarred by this event as I thought. But at the time, as much as I love radio work, I would head for BBC Pebble Mill with a stone in my stomach, I was so afraid of all I had to do. Looking back, I think that’s close to laughable because I was as ever the smallest cog in something, but radio requires constant concentration, minute by minute and sometimes second by second focus, for hours.

Quick side story. At this time I was spending my week writing manuals for some corporation or other. And I remember the contrast used to tickle me. In their office, there would be discussions about how tight some deadline was, and that deadline would be four months away. At BBC Pebble Mill, the deadline would more typically be the length of time it takes to open a fader, to slide a control up and take a microphone live. Both deadlines were real, both entirely valid, but the contrast delighted me. Plus I remember standing with a woman who mentioned how it had been raining when we left the office the previous evening and to me, having then done a shift on an evening newspaper, then a breakfast show spell on a radio station and then a day writing manuals, the previous evening felt like a century ago.

Anyway. I’m just putting things off now.

On this particularly memorable Saturday or Sunday in the 1980s or 1990s, I was driving the desk for a sports show and for the first time, I was on my own. There was a lot of this sports stuff going on and so much so, all of it apparently so crucial that the presenter who scared me was out at one of the games or matches or whatever they’re called in whichever sport it was. Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

That presenter was the producer and via talkback from whatever ground – that’s the word, ground – he was at, he was still producing, but I was the central small cog. My job was primarily to switch between that presenter here and this reporter there, to switch over to the news, I don’t know, lots of different sources and I was the one putting them to air. I love this work and I still think an old Mark III BBC Local Radio desk is a thing of wooden beauty.

All is going well. But then even though every possible presenter was out reporting live from every possible venue — maybe that’s the word — there was also other sport going on around the world and some of it was apparently significant. So another job I had was to tell this scary presenter what the latest results from them all were. This was before anything useful like the internet or mobile phones existed, there was then no way for this presenter to know any of these other results if I didn’t tell him over talkback.

And there was no way for me to know the results either, except that like every station and every newspaper, we had a TV with Ceefax on. I would later write for Ceefax and relish it, but right then it was just this thing that showed me sports results.

Including what turned out to be a world-record-breaking cricket score.

I must’ve read out more than a dozen scores down the line to the scary presenter and he would then casually slip them in to his on-air commentary as if he were hardwired into sport everywhere. He was scary, but I think he was very good, too. Until the time came when I read out this world-record-breaking score and he did not know what to do.

It was such a big score, I mean, it broke a world record. And he was hearing it from me. Only from me. You’re on his side now, or you certainly should be, because even I wouldn’t trust that I was reading a score correctly. On that day, whenever it was, BBC Radio WM became the very last place to report on a world record in cricket, and BBC Radio WM was the only place to say live on air that they didn’t trust the eejit back at the studio.

I was that eejit. And as it turned out, I was completely accurate and correct: I could not explain to you what the score meant, but I was reading it entirely correctly.

Yeah, no, even I was and still am on the side of that scary presenter in this one.

Next yearn

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I’d like some credit here for speed: I think there’s a decent chance that this is the first conversation you’ve had about 2023. Except it is more about 2022 and how, for me, that feels like it’s already over.

This is partly because I’m writing an episode of my little 58keys YouTube series that can only run in Christmas week, but also I’m doing a thing in December. It’s called a holiday and I’m sure you’ve read about these too, but for such a long time now, I’ve spoiled the first couple of days of a break, even or especially if that break is just a couple of days. I’ll have been working up to the last conceivable second, quite often beyond that, too, and the moment I’m clear of all the work, I get sick.

You know about this, too, though I hope not from experience. The adrenaline is spent, the momentum is gone, you’re clutching your stomach and examining porcelain close up, knowing you’re going to have to clean that next and that lasagne is not always the great idea it seemed.

So the plan is to not do that.

This seems like a plan.

But it entails scheduling the work better and, frankly, dropping a lot of it. I’ve got a little while yet but two weeks before this break, I will stop getting up at 05:00. I won’t take on any evening work that I haven’t already committed to. I will take time off in order to then take some time off.

Which could be okay, except for this. It means the year is over.

That’s a huge exaggeration, obviously, but it’s not very long until this Great Two Week Pause before the holiday, then there’s the couple of days away, and when I’m back it will be full-on late December. I am not going to get any new projects off the ground before the end of 2022.

It’s just hard to see another year go when I haven’t achieved anything. I did double the subscribers to that YouTube channel, and actually I write it each week so I have just been paid for something like 45 scripts this year. I did run a newsroom for a spell, did get to judge on a couple of awards, have become Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild once more, have read exactly ten times more scripts than I’ve written. And yesterday I unblocked a sink. So, you know, there’s that. I also saw The Pensioners from Fame in concert.

But I cannot seem to shake how this was the year I should have had a BBC Radio 4 play on. That one small thing, just 45 minutes, would have defined 2022 for me and instead the fact that legal problems destroyed it, that appears to have defined 2022 for me.

I have met a lot of people this year, surprisingly often through that 58keys series, and I cherish that. But I’ll be glad to step over into 2023 and do that year properly.

But first I’ll spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about how the word “year” is so close to “yearn”.