radio

Exorcise regime

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You’re never too old to learn something, fine, but apparently it’s also never too early in the morning, either. For it’s not 08:00 yet as I write this to you and already I’ve learned something vital today. I’ve learned that the bins aren’t collected as early as they used to be.

If you heard the words “oh, no” at 07:08 today, it was me. Reaching for the kettle, thinking about you, freezing with a hand on a teabag when I remembered the bins need to be out by 06:00.

Fastest bin-putting-out-ing I’ve ever done. And now, with that kettle boiled and you right here, there’s no sign of the bins being collected yet. I know what you’re thinking but I checked: the neighbours’ bins are out and haven’t been collected, it’s not that I missed it.

It’s that I forgot because I was away. Sitting right here on my couch, barely even wearing pyjamas, and with nothing but a pint of water next to me, still I was away. Can’t tell you where yet, but wherever it was, I was there in a script. Today marks 71 days since my BBC Radio 4 play was destroyed – I’m learning French on Duolingo and every single sodding fucking day it tells me how long it’s been since the play died on my 1,000th day of Francaise. Anyway, after 71 one days, you can tell I’m quite clearly over this career low, but I can tell you that sometimes I’m doing better than it seems.

Such as for an hour sometime between 05:00 and about 07:00 weekday mornings. I’ve only been doing this for a week or two now, but I’m writing a script that steals the essence of the failed radio play. It steals the essence, I think it may even improve on it, but what I’m certain of is that it can’t be stopped the way the play was. No one’s waiting for this script and the odds of any one project getting made aren’t gigantic, but Alan Plater had this nice line in “Misterioso” about keyboards as weapons. A piano player is in a kind of musical fight with a trumpeter, and points out later that he won because he can play ten notes at a time. “Kept eight for myself and used to two to insult him. You only need two fingers to insult anyone.”

My keyboard is QWERTY and I don’t want to make it sound like I’m picking a fight over the consonants – I’m not a vowel-ent man – but I’d be okay if my punctuation were interpreted as revenge. I’m quite disciplined about the regime of clearing time before the rest of the day’s writing work, it’s just a bonus that I’m exorcising some radio demons as I go.

More importantly, for my politeness and mental well-being, I’m now 41 pages into a TV script that cannot be blocked by legal issues, cannot be stopped by anyone. As I say, no one’s waiting for it either, so don’t let me get carried away, this might be rubbish and it may never be shot at all. But right now, for these weeks, that doesn’t matter, if it ever matters at all, because this is mine.

It’s got so that every night for a week now, I’ve actually been looking forward to the morning and to climbing back into the world within this script. I try to write for just one hour, and that hour can be anywhere between 05:00 and 07:00 depending on when I can make myself get up, but today it was all the way between 05:00 and 07:00, it was the full two hours, because I wasn’t here, wasn’t on this couch, I was away in where the script is set.

People who want to be writers because they want to go to the Oscars and be as rich as JK Rowling, well, they haven’t paid attention to how writers are treated or how we fare, but they are also missing out on why writing is the best job ever created and then some.

I wish this happened more often, it’s actually quite rare for me, but these moments like today, when you’re in your own script so deeply that you forget the bins, there’s nothing like it. The closest, perhaps, is when you’re reading a superb novel and its world is enveloping you, except you are creating that world, you are pushing it along. It feels like you’re inside a small and delicate bubble and if you press on the sides just right, you expand it out to where it needs to be.

Where it needs to be is about 80 pages and right now I’m on page 41. I do not know what can possibly go on page 42, I do not have the smallest pixel of an idea what will go on there. I want to find out, and I will early tomorrow morning, but then I also don’t want to reach the end. I want to stay in this script.

I want to stay in it today, too, but I know that however good or bad my script is, it’s better if I limit it. Write until you drop and, well, you’ve dropped. Write until you have to put the bins out, and then you leave it in a good place, you’re in a good position to pick it up fresh tomorrow.

It’s not rare that I get absorbed in the writing, but it is rare that lose myself in a piece this much. So maybe the lesson I’ve learned today is that writing, whether I’m actually doing it well or not, is everything I want.

Alternatively, it could be that I’ve learned the bin collection schedule has changed and I could stay in bed longer.

Diddy Do It

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I am not trying to distract you or me from what’s going on in the UK and the relief that the Opposition party announced that they’d do the same crap as the government, just presumably crappier, though they were a little light on the details.

No, it’s actually vital that I talk with you about a failed project of mine. I urgently need to tell you about a radio project that went nowhere so long ago that I can’t remember. I want to say 1996, so I’m going to, but it could be earlier. Details are crucial, you see.

This is going to sound more than it was, but sometime around then I and a BBC Radio producer had a project we wanted Ken Dodd to do. It was a series, I think maybe five short episodes, that would’ve had Ken Dodd as a detective. A detective walking the mean streets of somewhere, Ken Dodd and his Diddymen, Ken Dodd with a revolver and a tickling stick.

It was a murder mystery comedy and if you remember Ken Dodd’s act and you have forgotten the title up above, you may enjoy being surprised that I called the show “Diddy Do It.”

I did write it, my writing was atrocious, but I can only guess that was why Ken Dodd turned us down. I never knew why, I’m not actually sure now that he even saw a script, but I do know when. Kind of. If it were 1996 when we did this, it was at least 1997 and maybe 1998 before he said no.

Dodd was famous for his comedy, of course, and also how his stage shows were brilliant, but would run so uncontrollably long that people would miss the last bus home. What was less known, because few needed to, was that he was also his own agent.

I want to say I was warned going in that this meant everything took a long time, but I could be guessing.

The one thing I can be certain of is what I called the first two episodes. You may not remember his act, you may pretend you’re too young to, but I am certain that no one else has ever done this.

Episode 1 was called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”. And episode 2 was also called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”.

Such a shame the episodes weren’t as good as their titles.

Stupid count

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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.

Reading enough into it

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Last night I reread an Aaron Sorkin script for his comedy series Sports Night and it was the 220th screenplay I’ve read this year. I’ve been reading at least one script every day since late December 2017 and so “The Local Weather” was also my 1,469th in this run. And yet it wasn’t until during this one that I remembered.

I remembered what it was like the first time I read a script. I don’t mean when I read The Time Tunnel: The Last Patrol on December 23, 2017. I mean back in the day, back whenever it was. While I’ve not been so regular about it before, I’ve read scripts all my life but there must’ve been a first one.

I definitely can’t even remember what it was or even begin to guess. I mean I’ve just turned to my shelves and I’ve a couple of hundred books of TV, film, radio and theatre scripts. But there must’ve been a first and somehow, reading this one – more likely re-re-reading it – the sensation came back.

And that sensation is excitement.

You forget things so easily. But to have a show that made you laugh, that reached inside you, that changed you, and then to see its script. No actors, no music, just the bare words on the page and it is a thrill. From that writer’s mind to yours, a direct connection. A sense of enormous effort behind each casual line, before it even got to the screen.

Drama is collaboration and I’ll never think it is or should be anything else, but you can’t see drama direction without there being a script. (Well, maybe when it’s very bad.) You can’t see an actor’s performance without there being a script. Possibly only music can have two lives, existing in its own right as well as being part of the final mix.

I suddenly remember giving a friend a spare copy of the published Frasier scripts I’d got –– I’d bought one and then Channel 4’s press office sent over a copy to the newsroom –– and I can still see her face. They’re scripts, she said. I don’t know how to read scripts.

You see her point of course: all that formatting, all those page conventions like INT and EXT, it’s something you need to get used to. But I must’ve given her that book around the year 2000 and by then I was already so familiar with the form that it took me a beat to comprehend what she meant.

I must ask her if she’s ever read it.

UPDATE: I did. I sent her a message and –– she is such a good writer –– she sent a line straight back that instantly made you picture her shuffling her feet uncomfortably. “A bit,” she said. She read it a bit.

I was going to say that I can’t understand why that delights and tickles me so much but of course I can: she wrote the reply well. What I can’t understand is quite why scripts thrill me so much.

But we don’t need to understand or comprehend or label a thrill. I’m just going to get some tea, head out into our garden and – depending on how you count – enjoy reading script number 211 aka 1,470. It’s going to be the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and I can’t wait.

All artifice just script away

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Last week I was asked why I read other people’s scripts. For one brief, rather happy moment I thought the fella might be asking because I am such a fantastic writer that I have no need of learning from other people.

No, he said, I mean why read the scripts when you can just see the bloody film?

He had a point. Crushingly cruel as he was.

I do know many writers who will avoid the actual script if the film or the programme or the show has been made. The script is, as I completely understand, the detailed blueprint. It’s not the final show any more than a house is the sum of its elevation drawings or isometric projections.

And I’ve just now finished being one of the many judges on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s radio awards. I can’t tell you which entries were my favourites and apparently I can’t even know myself which one has actually won. But I can tell you that some of us simply read all the scripts while others listened to all of the finished shows instead.

I can make you a strong argument for both. If you needed this for some test, I could stock you up with reasons to read the script and reasons not to.

You can imagine all of them except, I find myself hoping, one that matters rather a lot.

It’s quicker to read the script.

There. I’ve said it. I can read an hour-long script in about twenty minutes. A full-length feature film, say 120 pages, is maybe fifty minutes reading time at most.

I do read quickly but I never speed-read and I don’t skip anything, it’s just that I’m fast and scripts have very few words on the page anyway.

There is also this. I know in the first few seconds on page one whether I’m going to think it’s a good script. Recently I read a set where it took a page to get going and if we were in production I’d just kill those pages. But even then, they didn’t get going good enough: my first reaction was maybe harsh but definitely fair.

One interesting thing about reading other people’s scripts is that you come back to your own with a different perspective. Hopefully a better perspective but unquestionably different.

The trick is to read the ones by the fantastic writers.

Some 529 Not Out

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Look at me there: I could not, just could not write a title that begins with a number. I had to contort that word ‘Some’ into it and I think that changes the meaning. If I were sure what it changed the meaning to, I might worry but if you don’t mind, I’d like to put all of this behind us and discuss 529 other topics.

As I write to you, it’s half midnight on Thursday 25 October 2018 and it’s not as if I’ve finished work, it’s more that I have to stop. I’m running a day-long workshop tomorrow for actors, musicians and journalists, and I’d like to be a teeny bit further along with the planning. Each time I do one of these, I rewrite the whole thing just to really get it all into my head and to freshen it up.

Tonight I want to add in a photo but considering the mistakes I’ve been making for the last hour, I’d probably end up photographing my thumb.

So the sensible thing is to stop, get some sleep and pick it up in the morning. There’s time, it’s sensible and practical.

Only, there’s also that 539 business.


I decided to read a script a day for 2018 and it’s fair to say that I’ve failed because so far I’ve read 539.

I haven’t read one tonight. Er, Thursday, I haven’t read one. I have a pain in my side from writing at this table for the last five hours, there is a bed calling to me from less than a metre away – this isn’t the most luxurious of hotels – and, oh, stop looking at me like that.

Okay, fine. Okay. I’ll read number 540. Because of that face of yours.

I’ve no idea what it will be as I’ve exhausted the short Danger Mouse ones.

But I do know this. I am writing a lot better this year. And there may have been some truly dreadful scripts. Yet I’ve been engrossed and exhilarated and sometimes upset to the point of tears too. And just occasionally, I’ve been a bit proud.

Such as now. I’ve read 530. I picked a short film script of my own because it was here and because I couldn’t remember anything about it. Also, it was short and you were looking a bit mad at me.

It’s not great. But the idea is and the script feels alive. I finished it wondering who I could pitch it to.

So on the one hand I do credit reading a lot of scripts but I also blame you for being so disciplined with my time. Can I go to sleep now?

No better time

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This is going to sound so optimistic that you’ll think I’m auditioning to write for Hallmark Cards. But I mean it.

I mean this: right now is the best time there has ever been to be a writer.

Okay, just to get Hallmark off my back, I will also say that this is the worst time it has ever been to be a paid writer. Getting money for this is tough. But while I can’t and won’t discount the problems, the opportunities are astonishing.

I was doing a writing masterclass session at Birmingham City University this week where we discussed a couple of students’ work in detail. One of them was a short radio play and I’m blathering on about it when I realise that actually what this writer needs isn’t me.

She needs to make that play.

And she can.

Now, I’ve been in Birmingham City University’s radio studios and they are impressive: I presume she can book space there. And there’s a School of Acting around the place so I imagine casting isn’t going to be a great problem.

But as handy as all that is, the truth is that she’s got a phone. I don’t know what phone and I don’t know what recording apps she may have, but for pennies she can turn that phone into a recording studio.

She can even edit the audio on the phone and I’ll never get used to that. I don’t mean that as in I’ll never cope with doing it on phones, I mean that I edit audio a great deal and it is forever a delight what you can do now. I learned on giant BBC local radio desks and I was taught to edit with razor blades and chinagraph pencils. And, actually, I think sometimes you learn better from doing it physically, from doing edits where you can’t undo them with a tap or a click.

But then that’s really what I think about writing now. You have always been able to write but now you can see and hear how that writing works. Immediately. Pretty much.

I had lots to say to this student about her script and I loved that she and the whole room had lots to tell me that I’d missed in it. But ultimately I mean it: write something, make it, and you’ll learn what works and doesn’t work for you.

I don’t quite know how this goes for novelists but for scriptwriters, this is the best time there ever was. If only we could lick the money problem.

Restored to life

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Confession: I backup everything I write, everything that lands on my Mac, everything. But I rarely go into the backups to restore anything. Until this week when my arm was twisted into powering up my last computer again and doing some work with it. I’m going to claim that it doesn’t matter what the work was but really, I just cannot remember – because of what I found instead.

Every five or six years I buy a new Mac and take a minute or two to bring over all my current documents. I also promise to sort out the pile of hard drives I have inside some of these Macs and outside all of them but I never do.

This week I did and it’s been like data archaeology. Let me just tell you this first: here on my old Mac Pro I found I’d got 44 feature films. They appear to have been ripped from my DVDs but I don’t remember doing that.

Then there are 279 whole episodes of TV series. Some DVD rips, some iTunes purchases, I don’t know.

And 15,768 radio or other audio tracks.

I do understand that one because I used to have my Mac Pro automatically switch itself on to record the Afternoon Drama on BBC Radio 4 every day so there’s a pile of those. It’s a pile with titles like ‘Afternoon Play -ep723.m4a’ and no other way to work out what each is but to listen.

Then, too, I’ve made a lot of radio on my Macs so there’s surely a thousand or more tracks to do with that.

One more thing. Somewhere in that Mac Pro’s folders there were also 3,336 scripts. A thousand or more movie scripts plus entire series of television ones. Oddly few radio, for some reason.

All of this is now on a drive connected to my iMac and Backblaze, my online backup service, is sweating as it uploads the lot to cloud storage to make sure it is never lost, that it is always available to me wherever I am.

And that would be where I’d stop. Look at this, I could say: I’ve found all this glorious material and that it will of course occupy me, enthral me, distract me.

Only, this digging into a massive personal archive turns out to be a delicate dig into the past. It’s delicate because at first you see a photograph and alongside it there’s the date. It’s a file on your Mac, there’s the name and there’s the the Date Modified. It’s putting a pin in a memory – but then opening that image, looking at that document, just glancing at it changes the Date Modified to today. It’s like grasping at something that crumbles in your hand.

Now, if you dig slightly to the left and down a bit there is way to show the Date Created. But I didn’t think of that until I’d go into paroxysms about the ephemeral nature of even digital memories.

And as I write this to you, I’m actually back by that old Mac Pro because I wanted to get that screen grab of its display looking whitewashed. (When did I take that whitewash photo? Apparently Sunday, 8 September 2013 at 11:12.)

But I’m looking for that date and the drives inside this Mac Pro began giving out a little scream.

They’re going to die. And I’ve already plugged in one ancient external drive that I pointlessly struggled to find the right cables for because it’s dead.

We use these machines to do our work and to do everything, but along the way we are inadvertently documenting our entire lives in sometimes minute-by-minute detail. It’s not always great detail. It’s sometimes scraping when you find an old email and the text comes along with a tsunami of upset.

It’s not great detail when you learn what open wounds you still have. But it is great detail, it is the greatest of all details, when you a To Do list from 2003 that has hopes for the future that you’ve since achieved.

I’m not saying you should dig through your old computer documents and I’m definitely not saying you should do it without a strong mug of tea beside you. But I am saying you should backup everything. I’ve said that for years and meant it in very practical terms but today I mean it in emotional ones too.

408 Not Out

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I’ve said this to you before but if you don’t remember, it’s fine: just ask anyone I’ve ever passed on the street because I’ve told them this too. The sole way I have of guessing whether my work is any good is if I’m asked back to do it again.

And I think this might be very male of me but usually I also track the details, the minutiae of what I’m doing. Except for one thing: word counts.

I’m rubbish at this bit, I cannot now remember how I worked this out but I am certain that I’ve had over four million words published. I’m less certain but pretty sure that I’m on the way to five million. Half a billion words published.

Good or bad, that’s a career.

Only, there is a number that I know for absolute, documented fact because I absolutely document it every time it happens. It’s now five years since I was made redundant from Radio Times (I’ve been freelance since 1996 but RT put me on staff for a couple of days a week) and shortly after that, I was asked to speak at a festival. Five years, 1996, two days, these aren’t the numbers I track.

Instead, for some reason – and who knows why – I made a note of that festival and I gave it a number. I mean, I was delighted to be asked and I had a great time, but I don’t know why I gave it the number 1. I mean, Steph Vidal-Hall of PowWow LitFest interviewed me and even in the middle of answering questions I was admiring how deftly she was steering me the way she wanted, but I didn’t expect there to be a number 2.

There was.

From that first public speaking gig, I’ve talked at a lot of festivals, I’ve run very many workshops, I’ve been in schools, universities and prisons. Radio. Television, a bit.

So there was a number 2, there was a number 3 and last week there was number 408.

That’s an average of one and a half speaking gigs per week since I left Radio Times.

I was thinking that I’d tell you something useful I’d learned over those 408. I’m not sure I can say anything you don’t already know, though, so my mind’s gone on to how I’ve now mentioned Radio Times to you three times.

It is true that leaving RT was a blow.

It was worse than it sounds, too, because I didn’t just lose whatever it was, two or three days of staff work, I also lost all my freelancing with them. (Almost all: I still write the odd radio review them, even now. I was asked back once to work on a Radio Times book: that was a blast.)

I think at the time I left I was doing three different things, being on staff for the RT website, freelancing for the magazine and, er, something else. Maybe freelancing for the site. I don’t know. But it was typically the equivalent of eight days work per week, so Radio Times was a big deal.

Plus it’s Radio Times and I have adored that magazine all my life. Seriously, everyone should get chance to dip into their archives: I have had such bliss researching television history in those.

You’re aware that there are only seven days in a week, you’ve spotted that, so you can also see that there was no time for any other work than RT. Somehow that wasn’t true, I wrote my first book while I was still there.

It’s just that since I left, I’ve written or co-written another 17 books. Now I can’t figure out how I fitted RT in.

And yet you know this to be true: clearly I think about Radio Times, clearly I miss it, clearly leaving was such a big deal that it is part of me.

Not so much.

I feel bad saying this now because working on RT did mean the world to me, working with those people was tremendous, but it’s all on my mind now for another reason entirely.

It’s that when I left I popped the date into my calendar and for some reason marked it to repeat annually.

This date popped up on my screen the other day. I batted the notification away and carried on writing the script I was working on, but it obviously went into my head.

So I had wanted to give you some life lesson about presenting 408 times. Then I wanted to give you some kind of life lesson about how gigantic, shocking, startling, disappointing change can be fantastic.

But instead I’m just going to say you shouldn’t be so daft as to put reminders in your calendar for events that happened a lifetime ago.

You couldn’t make it up

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Long ago when I worked at BBC Radio WM in Pebble Mill, the sports department had a shelf of highlights on. Large spools of reel to reel tape with the recordings of famous local sporting events.

Only, I can picture that shelf now and I can remember being in that newsroom, looking at the reels and thinking well, er, no. These are not recordings of sports events.

They were recordings of radio presenters commentating on these events instead.

I’m not knocking the commentators, I’m in no way knocking the reasons for keeping the archive. It’s just that although it’s a slight difference, the tapes were regarded as the events themselves, not as the radio station’s commentary.

There’s something in that disconnection that I’ve been reminded of by all the writing about Donald Trump and Brexit. I keep hearing the phrase “you couldn’t make it up” and actually, yeah, you could. I think by now your audience would be a bit bored. They’d want some new characters, they’d be thinking we’ve got antagonists up our armpits, we need someone to be the hero. Anyone. Please.

I think the thing is that you wouldn’t make it up this badly. No matter whether you were commentating on events or especially if you are the poor sod who’s going to make a TV drama about all this one day, your very medium imposes certain things.

Commentators expect to be able to draw on previous statistics. TV drama writers inescapably want light and shade, they want pacing, they want to build to a conclusion.

None of that is available to us. It’s all dark, it’s all unrelenting and statistics are now alternative facts.

Hopefully this is just me but I can’t dramatise what’s going on. It makes me want to go write something else, to write about something or to create something that I can fashion, that I can explore, that I can convey something through.

We have the most visibly, publicly, proudly illiterate people in power that we may ever have had. Yet they are defying writers to comprehend them, they are controlling the disarray we’re in.

Maybe it will ultimately be good. Maybe this will shake us out of habits and patterns that we are used to, maybe it will make us – okay, me – writer better and deeper.

I don’t know about me and what I can do. But I do see journalism trying to fight back and I do see the writers of Saturday Night Live being on their best form in two decades because of it.

Maybe what I’ve been doing is trying to use writing to help me understand. Maybe I’ve been focused on the commentator’s tapes and really what I should do is go to the event.