Unresolved issues

There are things that must remain secret because they burn. But then there are also things that stay secret solely because they are of absolutely no interest. Two guesses which sort I want to tell you about today.

Here’s the thing. If I’m on my iPhone and start to type out “radiotimes.com”, then before I’m more than a few letters into that, it autocompletes for me. So far, not a shock, not a secret. But it autocompletes as “radiotimes.beeb.com”.

There’s no such site. There hasn’t been for an extremely long time, since at least five years before the first iPhone came out. The iPhone was 2007 – happy 15th birthday, iPhone – and I worked at Radio Times until at least 2010, possibly 2012, so even if I’d never gone to the site since, I have typed or tapped or linked to radiotimes.com just about eleventy-billion times more than I ever did “radiotimes.beeb.com.”

And every single time it autocompletes that and tries to resolve the address, I am back in 1997, crossing a certain road near my then home, reading the new issue of Radio Times magazine. If I picture looking at the cover, for some reason I’m seeing a November 1996 issue with The Simpsons on it, but apparently my vivid-clear memory is out by months.

Because the reason I remember this issue at all, remember this moment crossing a certain road as I read, is that it included the news that a Radio Times website was being launched that week. You’ll never guess the address.

For completeness, let me tell you that it didn’t didn’t actually launch then, there was a week’s delay for some reason that I didn’t know then, never heard later, and/or can’t remember now.

But 25 years ago, the Radio Times went online and what I remember in my stomach is how bad the news of it coming made me feel. Given my drama obsession, adding in my writing and technology background, I read this news about an RT website and felt failure. I should have been working on that, I should have proposed that site, I should have done a dozen different things and instead I was not then and would never be involved in this site.

If only I could remember so accurately when I got involved.

It wasn’t very long afterwards, I don’t think it was only weeks, but it can’t have been many months before I was writing on the Radio Times website and working out of Woodlands, a building near Television Centre. Forget how my iPhone tries to resolve this prehistoric “radiotimes.beeb.com” address, even now, even typing to you, it takes immense effort for me to not write “RadioTimes”, without a space. Because working there, I would write radiotimes.com so very often.

Let me do so one more time. RadioTimes.com is celebrating its quarter century now and if I wasn’t there at the start, I was near the beginning and I’m proud of that. Happy birthday, RadioTimes.com.

Wait.

Okay, no, explaining the radiotimes.beeb.com address is a 90-minute lecture with slides. Let me just skip to the bit that tickled me. Overall, beeb.com was a collection of BBC Worldwide sites including Radio Times, but its longest-lasting legacy was created by staff who needed to talk/meet/vent about it (delete as applicable).

And whoever set up this private staff-only alternative to beeb.com registered the address as peep.cow. To this day I don’t know how they registered an upside-down site name, but good on them.

Why I left Radio Times

I left Radio Times because they threw me out. Er, the end.

Okay, no, I say this to you and even one entire decade after I was chucked out of the Radio Times website and magazine, I want to explain that it was a budget thing. Some number of people had to go and it was so obvious that I was expendable at this particular point that I’d packed my bags at the start of the entire interview-for-your-own-job process.

That was the only bit I disliked and I’d actually forgotten it until I said that to you. Much as I loved Radio Times, that was telling me to take a typing test and that bit did piss me off. Even so, I’m not kidding: I knew immediately who would be kept on and who wouldn’t, and that was not from some fatalistic brilliance of mine, it was because it was that obvious.

Again you remind me of something. I say all of this to you and abruptly I can picture the room I was in when they told me. Mind you, this is also no startling feat on my part because the room was in the BBC Media Village and was one of the ones that had been decorated in the style of a BBC show. I was fired from Radio Times in the Doctor Who room. In fact, I’m a tiny bit unclear right now who the two people in front of me were, possibly three, but I am rock-solid clear about how I was sitting with my back to the TARDIS.

Which, if you discount the little detail that I was chucked out, is really why I left.

The actual ten-year anniversary is sometime in the middle of 2022, I’d have to figure it out to know when exactly, but it’s on my mind now because this week a colleague mentioned “The Writer’s Tale”, a book about the making of Doctor Who which I’d read before the aforementioned chucking out.

It is a very, very good book and was the idea of a Radio Times writer I don’t think I even ever met. Benjamin Cook. He asked Russell T Davies to email him about making Doctor Who and the result is – wait, let me check Amazon UK – 704 pages of immense detail. I expect it’s the same length on Amazon US.

Immense detail doesn’t cover it, oddly enough. This book is an oppressive whirlwind of pressures, even as it somehow manages to be joyous at exactly the same time. I remember reading it at night, unable to stop hours after my body was ordering me to sleep, and feeling this same intensity you get from nightmares.

God, it’s a great book.

But this Writers’ Guild colleague mentions it and that’s what put me back ten years or so, put me back in the Radio Times newsroom office like it was, well, not yesterday but no further back than Tuesday at the absolute most.

I can close my eyes and take you around that entire huge, open-plan space. I can point out where I usually sat. I can see in slow motion the moment when I once stood up and saw two identically-dressed people at opposite ends of the newsroom. And consequently realised at last that this is why I’d sometimes have a great chat with her and sometimes she’d blank me like a stranger.

Less embarrassingly and far more fascinatingly, to me anyway, is how I can also picture the precise angle from my usual seat where the office segued into the kitchen. Happy, cheery people would walk by on their way to get tea and at the same exact spot, once or twice they’d turn blood-angry. Like they’d been asked to take a typing test. Real anger, contained only by a desire to keep their job, and then at this moment no longer contained at all.

Always that same spot, always as they passed by me at this same angle.

I suddenly wonder if they just didn’t like me.

Anyway.

Last one. I can also picture-remember the different spot I happened to be sitting in when I was sneaking a few minutes to carry on reading “The Writer’s Tale”.

Again, sorry, fuzzy on the detail. This was some time before 2012, could even have been as far back as 2008 when the first edition of the book came out.

Whenever it was, the moment is vivid for me, the very feel of the paperback in my hand and the pages under my fingers, right here in my head like there’d been a flashbulb. All because of one moment in one of the email exchanges I was reading. Benjamin Cook had asked Russell T Davies about some particular decision in the making of Doctor Who and he’d replied with the answer. I want to say it was to do with casting, but forgive me, my flashbulb memory clearly has some limits.

The key thing, though, is that this was an email conversation. You’ve had a few of those yourself. So you know that every single one, every single exchange in the entire book comes with a date and time stamp. The day, the hour, the minute, that the email was sent.

And that’s why I left.

Because I was fascinated to read about this decision chiefly since I vividly remembered writing a news story for the Radio Times website about precisely that.

Only, I wrote the news story pretty much exactly one year after that email exchange.

I looked up from that page and for the first time, I was no longer where I wanted to be.

I now wanted to be making the decision, not writing about it a year later.

The end.

Okay, no. It should be the end. That would be the right dramatic ending: I look up, realise I don’t belong there anymore, and I get out. Instead, I take a couple of years to leave and I’m very much afraid that I might still be there if they hadn’t shown me a door and which exact side of it they wanted me on.

But really I was gone that day back reading the Doctor Who book. Maybe that was why it seemed so clear to me that it was right to chuck me out. I wish now that I’d left years before, but then I also wouldn’t wish away any of the time I spent there. So I wish instead that those years had been more compressed, exactly the way the decade since has.

Missing Holby City

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.

Times and Spaces

I have a ridiculously good memory for places. I can boast about this to you because it is of no earthly value. Well, recently it helped me remember where a specific shot was in some video footage that I needed, so that’s nice. But for you, useless. I can’t direct you to a place, I can just know what it looked like.

It’s how I can close my eyes and take a walk around BBC Television Centre, or BBC Pebble Mill, or BBC Woodlands. Now I think of it, nearly every BBC building I’ve ever worked in has been demolished.

Well.

Okay, an equally useless example for you, but one that made me happy. The other night, I was watching a 1973 episode of Columbo called A Stitch in Crime by Shirl Hendryx. And I recognised a place. More than a place, I recognised a specific camera shot of the place. Recognised it and knew where I knew it from.

Columbo
Six Million Dollar Man

On the top, Columbo in 1973. On the bottom, a still from the title sequence of 1976’s The Six Million Dollar Man. Tell me you’re not impressed. Don’t tell me that this is pointless and useless, tell me you’re not impressed.

But this ability to precisely recall shots and angles and places is frustrating me this week. I do this quite often, but for many reasons I have this week been trying to remember exactly where there is not a coffee shop in Birmingham New Street Station. Not a coffee shop.

I could make a crack about how the place is now wall to wall coffee establishments, and of course just like you I could make a comment about long it has been since any of us have been out for coffee.

But the thing with this particular precise and impossible memory is that the coffee shop I’m thinking of used to be there. It was there before New Street was so radically transformed that the very bones of its geography seem different. I can see every step of what was its nearest entrance, I can see the shop – it was a freestanding stall with seats, really – and I can actually see a lot more.

I can see the specific seat and table I sat at. I can see the man I sat with and even the case by his left foot.

But while I do regularly try, I can’t map that precise memory onto where it would have been in the new Birmingham New Street.

And I really do try. Because for all the BBC places, all the magazines and all the websites, and the fact that at the time I was doing Doctor Who radio dramas and my first book was an inch away from coming out, a conversation I had there in 2012 is the most important one in my writing career.

It was a horrible time, actually. While I’ve been a full time freelance writer since the mid-1990s, from about 1999 to 2012, I’d been increasingly working for different parts of the BBC. It was always different parts, different departments across BBC News, the Corporation in general and BBC Worldwide, the commercial side of the BBC. Even within these, there would be variation. So I wrote a lot for Radio Times magazine, but I separately wrote a lot for the Radio Times website.

And in one of the BBC’s many times when it has to be seen to be saving money, I lost that freelance Radio Times website work but you couldn’t tell because they put me on staff instead. Only for one, two, four days a week at different times, but officially I was staff for that site. And still freelancing for the Radio Times magazine, BBC News, all of that.

In my head, I was still a freelancer. So when I tell you that I’ve spent thirty years doing this, I am not lying, but my accountant would wiggle his hand a little about the patch from 1999 to 2012. And unfortunately, even as my head tells me I was freelance, my head apparently forgot.

I forgot to be always looking for the next gig. I forgot that freelance work, no matter what way they choose to spell the word freelance, is always going to vanish.

So in 2012 when the BBC had another time that it had to be seen to save money and for once actually did, I lost all that Radio Times work completely. All of it. In one go. The BBC News work had dribbled away, too, and I hadn’t minded because at RT I was usually doing the equivalent of eight days work a week.

I think it was May 2012, I’m pleased to say that I’m no longer sure what month it was. But I lost it all very quickly and it was frightening.

Cue the conversation.

I wish I could remember how I found Writing West Midlands, I cannot pin down the route from living in Birmingham and finding them. Not in this way, not for this. I was aware of them from the Birmingham Literature Festival that they run. But in some way, I made contact, not even really sure why I was asking and what I was asking.

Jonathan Davidson of Writing West Midlands told me. He told me at that coffee stall in New Street Station extremely early one morning in 2012. Sized me up, asked me questions, made some suggestions, made some recommendations. The one I remember most distinctly was that he decided I’d be good at going into schools. “I’d like that,” I lied. Visiting a school seemed up there with weekly fitness classes at my dentist, but I wasn’t going to admit that.

I’ve just checked. Since that conversation, I’ve done 70 sessions in schools across the UK. I blame him.

That’s one of the many concrete suggestions he had, but I remember all of this because it was the start of rebuilding my confidence as a writer. I mean, I’m a writer, we don’t know from confidence, but I also hadn’t realised just how stripped back mine had become because of losing the BBC work. I thought I was low, I think now that I was much lower.

So usually I remember this because of how much better things are for me now as a writer. It’s still not a wine and roses kind of job, but I’m writing full time even during the lockdown and – I think – I’m writing the best I ever have.

The reasons that I’m particularly thinking of this today, though, are, well, many. Last night I finished writing a play that Jonathan has been encouraging me to do for more than a year. And also last night a friend told me he’d just had a meeting with him and that something in the meeting had reminded Jonathan of his one with mine all those years ago.

And I’m thinking of it because Jonathan Davidson will always get you writing, forever help you out with practical advice, and never mention that he writes too.

Well, bollocks to that. The man has a new book coming out and he’s promoting it with some deeply absorbing blog posts on his website. Here’s the site, here’s the new book. Go step inside the head of a man I owe.

A few thrilling moments (2019)

I need you to work with me on this. There’s a huge part of me that wants to tell you what I did last year. A huge part of that huge part is because I’ll dismiss everything, forget everything, and concentrate instead on what I failed to do if I don’t write it down somewhere like this. If I don’t tell you, basically.

I have written “A few thrilling moments” before – the title is a quote from Grosse Pointe Blank – but I haven’t for a long time and I wasn’t going to show you this year either. But I got a lot of response over Christmas from a tweet and a Facebook status where I recommended that you write this stuff down, specifically if you find New Year’s Eve hard.

Because, man, it’s hard sometimes. I can be having a fine old time and then midnight strikes like a hammer. All I can think of then is what I have failed to do all year and there’s of course so much of it that this thinking takes up the entire next day and multiple aspirin.

Plus, a friend, Heddwen Creaney, wrote her version on Facebook and it was so good that it lifted me, it emboldened me.

So may I tell you about my 2019? If that doesn’t already seem a very long time ago.

For a start, it included the best thing I’ve ever written, so far anyway, which was an incredibly short but deeply intense series of lines of dialogue for the National Trust’s What Is Home project, currently on display at Croome. That was more than a year’s work on what must’ve ended up at around 300 words. Worth every minute.

Also in 2019, I took a week-long research trip to Hull and that is the first time in my career that I’ve ever spent a continuous week on a single drama project. And I produced and directed a Cucumber night of theatre at the Birmingham Rep. That included a brief off-stage spot of acting from me because I was too cheap to hire another actor. And that may have led me to performing short stories of mine at Mouth Pieces or anywhere else that would have me.

I wrote something like 30,000 words in a month by month review of the year for AppleInsider.com, for where I also wrote many hundreds of features and news articles across the whole of 2019.

BBC Radio Wales got me on the phone once as a TV expert, and then BBC Radio Stoke immediately did the same, followed by my first time speaking down an ISDN line to BBC Five Live. I’ve done down the line before, representing Radio Times, but this was a first as myself. And it threw me a little: untold years ago, I used to earn a nice fiver during a BBC Radio WM early morning shift by showing people how to use the NCA Studio (News and Current Affairs) when they were guests on the Today programme. And now someone had to show me how to do it too.

That was in the BBC Mailbox, but Rosie Boulton came to my office to record me for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about writers in Birmingham. She followed one day across the city and I was first up in the documentary because I was first up in the day.

I ran the Room 204 buddying programme for my fifth year and started my first online mailing list for writing projects in 2020. That feels like the next thing I should do: in 2019 I did 90 workshops or other public speaking engagements for various firms and it’s a bit scattershot, I can’t tell you much in advance when or what they’re going to be, and I want to sort that out. Please consider this your personal invitation to join that list of mine: it’d be weird not having you on there.

Mind you, that 90 for other people and organisations did include working on some tremendous projects which were a true privilege to be involved in. I ran or assisted running Writing West Midlands’s Spark Young Writers’ workshops in Walsall and Wolverhampton, for instance. Through that same organisation’s National Writers’ Conference, I finally got to work with friends like Tom Wentworth, Stephanie Ridings, Lisa Blower and Casey Bailey, whose writing I deeply admire, plus spoke on a panel where I learned far more from fellow panelists than I contributed.

Speaking of speaking, I also spoke a couple of times at the National Youth Film Academy. I got to be a part of the Solihull BookFest where it turns out that an attendee had come there in part to check me out.

I didn’t know which person it was, or that they were there for that, but I seemed to do okay because I consequently got hired for a day working with USA teenagers. That was amazing, actually, there’s this decades-old education organisation called Experiment in International Living and I got to be part of the tour they gave these American teens.

Then the 90 speaking things doesn’t include something like 45 podcasts. Nor 7 YouTube videos I’ve produced for a series going live later in January. Nor an evening working with the Royal Television Society at their Big Telly quiz. And through the RTS, I had a great time working with a producer on a radio series proposal that went through some serious consideration at CBBC. It ultimately failed, but what a time.

For a writer, I did seem to spend a lot of time talking, but I did also get to edit Spark Young Writers’ magazine, and write a fair few pieces for The Space, an excellent arts organisation co-funded by the BBC and the Arts Council. I wrote a short story for a friend’s dad, wrote and rewrote many Time stories for a collection of mine now due out in 2020, and toward the end of the year cracked some seemingly impossible drama problems with the Hull project.

I can’t tell you what that project is yet, or even what the problems were, but, grief, they were gigantic. So much so that simply to prove to myself, and a producer, that it was physically possible to write this play, I wrote her the opening and closing scenes as a proof-of-concept. And I tell you this just because it’s you, those closing lines make me cry every time.

I can’t summarise the year without saying that I also cried a lot at my friend the writer Lindsey Bailey’s funeral. Can’t stop thinking of her, either.

Because of that, because of her, I did write my first half poem in some years. As much as poetry now gets to me as a reader, it’s one type of writing I can’t do and that I have never before been compelled to really try. This time, I had to, and poet friends tell me it’s half a poem. I just can’t ever complete it and just can’t stop myself showing you.

Liar

She’s not dead and I don’t know why she keeps saying she is.
She’s waiting to pop back in and it isn’t funny.
She’s in half the people I pass and I don’t want her there.
She’s not dead and I’m never talking to her again.

I don’t know. Nearly a year later, that burns me but I don’t know if it can even warm anyone else.

I also cannot measure where this next thing comes on the scale of good to bad. I’m again Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild, which is great; I represented the Guild at an event, which is great; but that event was Terrance Dicks’s wake.

He was a writer whose Doctor Who work was so influential to me that when I heard of his death, I could feel myself back in 1978 reading one of his books. And I mean feel: the sun of the summer holiday, the weight and the texture of the paperback in my hands.

I wrote an obit for him in the Writers’ Guild and I’ll be presenting another obit for him at the Guild’s awards in January. In 2019 I had a blast attending the Writers’ Guild Awards, for 2020 I’ve worked on them in my capacity as Deputy Chair. Now I just need to write something worth winning one.

I mean it when I say I’m telling you all of this because I will sink if I don’t make myself remember it. And I’m never going to diminish how bad we can all feel if we concentrate on failures.

But there’s also no earthly way that I pretend I haven’t just boasted at you. It’s only a boast if you’re impressed and I don’t know whether any of it seemed more than a shrug to you, but it meant a lot to me. Plus, I was there, I saw it all as it happened.

I’m a writer, a British writer, an ex-Catholic British writer, my stomach is in knots discussing all of this, even with you. But on the one hand, it’s better my stomach than my head.

And on the other, you know I’ll get over myself.

Now, it’s January the 3rd and I have completely failed to do anything at all ever.

On That Day

From November 12, 2005 to October 12, 2008, I used to write an On This Day piece for Radio Times. It was officially about television history, it was really about the history of how Radio Times covered television history, and it was a little column that appeared on every day’s listing’s page.

Well, depending on where you lived, that it is. The true reason for the piece was to fill a hole. Different regions of the UK got different editions of Radio Times and some of them needed a quite large section showing regional television variations. If you lived in an area where you could pick up two or more ITV stations, for instance, then RT listed them.

If you didn’t, your morning TV listings page had a hole in it.

Hello. I got to fill that space with about 90 words to do with something Radio Times had said about some television or radio show on that day. It obviously had to be true, but it also had to be interesting and preferably relevant somehow, plus naturally I had to write it so that you would hopefully enjoy reading it.

In the end, I wrote some 1,415 entries. I’d deliver them a week at a time –– except around Christmas where typically I’d have to write five weeks or 35 entries together to meet deadlines –– and every week I’d study the RT archive.

I can still picture certain weeks. Such as the time I was reading the RT archive in what was then the Central Library in Birmingham and there was a whole team of people doing the same thing as me. They weren’t half organised, too. I can picture four of them with laptops, pounding through issue after issue and noting down even more detail than I was.

That was the first time I met the Kaleidoscope group, an astonishing organisation that maintains a TV Brain database and finds lost television. If you’ve heard of a long-lost show being recovered, the odds are high that Kaleidoscope did it and through-the-roof high that Kaleidoscope was involved at some point.

And I also remember where I sat when I was, for once, working to a brief, and researching January 21. I’ve long told people that I had been supposed to write about The Glittering Prizes, a rightly famous BBC drama, and instead had gasped when I found that the children’s show Kizzy started on the same day. I used to tell people that I’d looked around the library, as if afraid someone would stop me, and instead of Prizes, I wrote about Kizzy.

Apparently it’s not true. I did sit there in the library, transported back to 1976 and seeing that show air, but I didn’t write about it for January 21. According to my research database, I instead pegged it to the show’s sixth and final episode on February 25, 1976. I wimped out.

I should say that the reason I stopped doing On This Day for Radio Times is that they had a redesign of the pages and no longer had a gap to fill. However, all these years later, they still know a good idea when they see one because RT’s Mark Braxton regularly does the same thing –– but he does it on Twitter.

This is all on my mind now because I came across the fact that on this day in 1987, The Tracey Ullman Show debuted in America. You know Tracey Ullman, but still you’re looking blank. This means that it was 32 years ago today that The Simpsons first appeared on TV. They were then a short insert into Ullman’s show and they’re now a mildly amusing sitcom. But in between those two, they were fantastic.

I hope I knew that before and that the only reason I didn’t cover it in RT was that this debut was in America. I’ve checked and I did cover when BBC1 first started airing The Simpsons proper – it was November 23, 1996.

But then while poking around this old research and enjoying myself, I found something else.


April 5, 1966. The Money Programme. As you can imagine, I made more notes than I ultimately used, so here’s a fuller quote from that original issue of RT.

“Britain is like the son of a rich man who has inherited the family fortune and is spending the lot,” said a Belgian banker who has extensive dealings in the City. With the recurrent tale of lost export orders, balance of payments trouble and pressure on the pound, people aboard now speak of “the English sickness” which has dogged us since the war, rather than any spectacular business achievements. They must wonder what happened to the British flair for business.

This year is bound to see dramatic developments. With a debt of £899 million round our necks to be repaid in four years, and a current balance of payments deficit, we cannot escape the pressure to improve our efficiency. Even without the pressure of our economic difficulties, the impact of automation, and the computer (felt increasingly in America) is bound to raise many painful issues for management, labour, and Government, in this country. We must prepare for a second industrial revolution.”

That’s 53 years ago and today everything is so different.

My hardest writing job

I do want to tell you about the single hardest thing I’ve done, and as soon as I type that to you I think of a few other things that would be a contender. But really I want to talk with you about how astonishing it is that something which was a stone in my stomach six days out of seven every week for 18 months could be so completely forgotten.

I mean, it was writing and it was in Radio Times every week back in 2005/6 when that magazine’s sales figures were just over one million and the estimated readership was three million. So it’s not impossible that you saw it. It’s unlikely, but it’s not impossible. If you did read every week of it, though, you’d still have completely forgotten about it because it was the smallest slice of nothing.

No exaggeration. It was perhaps 100 words in each issue and lived on a corner of the letters page.

What astonishes me is that I’d forgotten it entirely too.

Yesterday, I was on the Dot Davies show on BBC Radio Wales as an author and TV historian. It was in response to the news that some 7,000 people in the UK have a black and white TV licence. A bell rang. I think now that it was a Cloister Bell warning of dire trouble because for the first time in 12 years I remembered Radio Times and the TV Stats column. I remembered covering this topic in there.

Only a week ago, I was talking with someone about RT and told them that I’d written the On This Day in TV History piece for it. I can’t remember how long I did that but it was at least four years and every issue had a little nugget by me on each of the day’s listings page. I remember that, I’m proud of that, but I’d clearly suppressed TV Stats.

But I had a couple of hours between BBC Radio Wales asking me and my being on the Dot Davies show. So I searched. I’ve got RT on PDF up to the late 2000s so it didn’t take as long to search as this will sound, but I did go through 60 editions before I found it.

I can’t show you any. Each week was this 100 words or so but it would always be accompanied by a cartoon illustration and I didn’t do those. I said that six days out of seven I was in pain about this: you’ve guessed that the seventh day was when I delivered the copy and the strain was off until tomorrow. But there was also the pleasure of seeing what cartoonist Robert Thompson had come up with.

I’d get that pleasure twice, actually. I’d usually be shown his roughly-sketched proposal and then every week I’d open the issue to see the final illustration. I can’t imagine how hard a job it was to illustrate this stuff in an amusing cartoon fashion.

At the time, though, I was too full of how hard it was to write. The job was to think of a topic to do with television and then research or calculate some statistics to go with it. Find an interesting topic, figure out the details and then hope the result was worth publishing because otherwise it was scrapped and you started again. And of course still facing that same deadline.

Oddly enough, I have an idea that this one about how many people in the UK still had black and white TV licences was among the easiest. I can’t recall now whether I was specifically asked to find out or whether it was my idea, but I’m pretty sure that I just phoned the TV Licensing people and asked them.

The answer, by the way, was 58,000 people and I either calculated or was told that at that time in 2005 this was 0.2% of the licence-owning population. At this distance of 13 years, I can feel an echo of the relief that week.

When you’re writing something like this you can’t get too far ahead because there’s supposed to be at least some element of topicality. But also you should try to have a few ideas banked up and ready. Sod that. The joy of having filed that copy and not absolutely having to think of the next one for a couple of days was fantastic.

I do say days. Because I truly had bad nights because of TV Stats.

This all sounds overblown, I know, and especially so because I’ve had many columns and myriad deadlines. Yet this one is giving me the sweats again today, over a decade since it finished.

Precisely how many films were shown on terrestrial TV in 2005? How many shopping channels are there? What proportion of digital channel profits come from advertising and from our subscriptions? Just how many characters in EastEnders are self-employed compared to real life? Exactly what percentage of characters in Albert Square have owned the Queen Vic?

You’re curious about that last one, aren’t you? In 2005, the answer was that 6.5% of all major characters in EastEnders had owned that pub.

You see the job. Try to find something interesting, try to put a figure on things we’d all noticed like that turnover of Queen Vic owners. Oh! I remember proving that the murder rate in Morse was actually pretty much the same as the real-life number of murders in the Oxford area. That was because Morse ran in very short series each year where actual murderers tended not to take such long breaks.

Anyway.

Week after week. I should be able to rattle off the statistics of how many I did but I’m rebelling. It was something like 18 months and I won’t research any closer than that.

I’d rather tell you instead of one moment of relieved pride. I got the commission over email, I think, but there was to be a big meeting to decide how all this would be done. Here’s how much TV Stats buried into me: I can still picture that meeting. Where it was – BBC Woodlands in London, the second of three BBC buildings I worked in that was demolished – and also exactly who was there.

I can remember where I sat and who I faced. How’s this for research? I can show you that spot.

Radio Times office 2008

That shot is from 2008 and this was just before the place was demolished. So, first in one morning, I took a photo tour of the whole place. See that second chair from the left? I don’t remember whose that usually was but for this meeting, that’s where I remember sitting.

I can also remember that I’d misunderstood the brief and the example I’d brought had the text right but I’d illustrated it myself. I’m not then and never will be a cartoonist but I’d done some Photoshop work that was a graphical illustration of whatever statistic I’d found. I remember the art editor saying he didn’t know how to do what I’d done.

That was the moment of pride. And being gently told they had their own illustrators was the relief.

Oddly, I’ve no memory at all of TV Stats ending. I know it began because of a redesign on the magazine that saw the letters page bumped to the back of the issue. I imagine it ended because of the next redesign, but I don’t know.

TV Stats was one fraction of one job I had as a writer and yet it punched high above its weight because of how difficult it was to think of the bloody things. I did learn to write better because of it: I learned how to make the very most out of a sometimes flimsy statistic to produce an interesting read because there was usually no alternative and often no time.

And apparently it is all still lodged in my brain as it was waiting to pour out of me yesterday. I did get to bring up that 58,000 figure on BBC Radio Wales but I don’t think it particularly contributed to the piece.

There’s a bit of me that quite likes that.

Oh! One more memory? I spent at least seven hours one week calculating how much you would have to spend on Amazon to buy all the spin-off merchandise from children’s TV shows. You know it’s a lot but, sorry, I can’t either remember or find the figure.

But I can tell you that to this day Amazon notifies me each time there’s a new product to do with Dora the Explorer.

TV got better when I stopped reviewing it

That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. Once I left BBC Ceefax and when my Radio Times work became more news and less reviews, I felt that television drama and comedy took a lurch upwards.

Just saying this to you now makes me think of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle where if you measure something’s location, you affect its speed and vice versa.

But really all that happened, all that changed was that I no longer had to watch to the end of rubbish shows. So now I was only seeing series that I enjoyed.

Still, there is a thing about being required to watch TV and specifically to be required to watch to the end. Usually it’s a good thing, too, although again as my fingers type this to you my head has just flashed back to Harbour Lights. That was a 1999/2000 BBC drama by many good writers but you didn’t watch it. You can now: it’s on YouTube.

I watched it back before YouTube was imaginable. I remember this night so particularly clearly because I was trying to get ahead one week and this was the big launch, this was the big new show, clearly it was going to be the one reviewed and I had the tape right there. What I don’t remember is exactly what happened next but some other show get that night’s review slot and you are now reading the first words I’ve ever written about Harbour Lights.

But then there are the shows I probably wouldn’t have watched, might not have got around to watching, or wouldn’t have caught until years later.

I’m thinking of three of them.

Some time around 2003, I think it was, two DVDs with the Battlestar Galactica mini series came in to the Radio Times office. This is a TV show but it was funded by Sky and that broadcaster decided to put it out first on its movie channels. So RT wasn’t going to review it as television and the film team had already written a dismissive 50-word description broadly saying how rubbish television is compared to movies.

Then for some other reason I never knew, Sky delayed airing the movie. So those disks lay there on a desk for a week or more until one night when I was coming home to Birmingham by coach and had nothing to watch. You’re thinking I took those disks and loved them, but you’d be wrong.

I took one of the disks and was furious at myself because it was going to be a week before I could get the second.

Then let me take you back again to VHS tapes. I used to get piles of VHS tapes from the broadcasters and I particularly enjoyed going to collect them from the BBC Previews Department. Great people, I liked them tremendously, and on the supremely circuitous route you had to walk from Ceefax to their office, you went through the scenery bay where they kept the TARDIS.

This was long before Doctor Who came back and the new show built its own police box so this old one was just left there from affection. Plus you could store so much inside it.

I definitely got the Harbour Lights tape from them and just looking up air dates now, I think it’s possible that in the same week Channel 4 sent me Queer as Folk.

I don’t remember if I watched them on the same night. I do remember staying over in London in some B&B that had a TV set and a video. I remember being dog-tired. I remember being rather hungry. And I can see something like six VHS tapes in a pile that felt like the most enormous slog to get through.

Until I popped Queer as Folk in.

There’s a story that the first scene of Queer as Folk was coming across as a bit serious, that its tone was setting up the show to not feel the way it should. So an extra scene was written, shot and inserted at the start of the episode. It’s Craig Kelly as Vince talking to camera about one night out on Manchester’s gay scene and concludes with a description of a man who “has every episode of Juliet Bravo on tape”.

It’s fast and funny and booms you into the series – and I didn’t need a word of it because I was already grabbed. I tell you, I can vividly recall sitting up as the title sequence started. I just watched it again now and there is a verve, a call to action, a delighted energy in the music and that was it. A dog-tired, hungry slog of an evening was now great.

The music was by Murray Gold, the series was written by Russell T Davies, produced by Nicola Schindler and the first episode directed by Charles McDougall.

Can I tell you one more? Because it’s the reason I’m remembering all of these shows this week. For twenty years ago on 6 June 1998, Sex and the City began.

That’s the original US air date and apparently Channel 4 first aired it here in 1999. I know it’s not from the same night’s reviewing as Harbour Lights and Queer as Folk because I can remember the different hotel room.

And I can remember having only it to watch. If I hadn’t, if I’d got other shows to get through, I’d have got through them. Because I didn’t think episode 1 of Sex and the City was good at all.

Whereas episode 2, Models and Mortals, was great. Both the first two were written by series creator Darren Star but I thought then that pilot was heavy handed and this next one flew. There’s got to be an issue of how I knew the characters going in to episode 2 but still, pilots are hugely difficult and I don’t think this one worked.

So there’s a lesson for us both. Watch every episode of everything because it might turn out to be brilliant. There you go.

408 Not Out

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.

I have no stories about Prince

Well, apart from Kunmi making a group of us go see Purple Rain in the cinema and it being the first and last film I saw with an intermission. The confusion when something purple turned into an ad for a ice lolly, the relief when this meant a break from the film, the sinking feeling that maybe we were only half way through it.

Not that it would be very long before I liked the music from the film but that evening in Derby, that was a long time all by itself.

Whereas I do have a short story of the time I may possibly have slightly annoyed Victoria Wood. Last week I was talking to you about the times I interviewed Gareth Thomas for no purpose – there was a bit more to it than that but it’s a fair summary – and now there’s that time I crossed Victoria Wood for no reason.

Listen, I feel I’m trivialising the news of her death and Gareth Thomas’s, maybe also of Prince’s. Trivialising it down into anecdotes from what I appear now to think is my great celebrity-mingling career. Reducing a life when the most I would want to do is reduce a death: I want to reduce these down into them not happening, please.

Gareth Thomas would not recognise me on the street. I am connected to Prince only via seven billion degrees of separation and I could name more of them than he ever would. And for one half of one moment, there’s Victoria Wood frowning at me. I’m thinking I’ve annoyed her, she’s probably thinking “Did he say something?”

It was at a BBC event and I remember Lee Evans making me convulse, I remember someone very senior agreeing to my interviewing him or her but then spending the ten minutes either looking over my left shoulder to find someone more interesting or talking over my right to somebody across the room. I remember all this and I can picture it, I can picture the table Wood was at when I sat down next to her, I just cannot recall what the event was or when.

Good grief. The handy thing about that Very Senior person is that I can carbon date the event because of her or him. I just looked up him or her and can see from a Wikipedia timeline that the event had to be between 2000 and 2005. I would’ve sworn to you it was the 1990s.

Whenever it is and whatever I’m there for, it’s work and I’d guess either for BBC Ceefax or Radio Times. I’m definitely there to ask questions and learn things. Only, I remember that at the moment I got to Wood’s table, I was thinking about how she was on tour and that meant doing the same show every night for months. I was thinking about how you imagine a writer writes and their writing is finished whereas you know a singer has to re-perform the material over and over. I was thinking of the repetition and the difficulty of that.

So what I thought I was asking Victoria Wood was about whether it’s hard to go back out on stage repeatedly. I know I actually asked about how presumably there must be some nights when you don’t want to do it.

“Well, I hope I’ve never disappointed anybody,” she said and that was about it. Someone else came along, I picture myself reaching out through the swell of people as I say Nooooo in slow motion and they all block my view of just how much offence I’ve given her.

I did offend her and she did take it as an accusation that there are evenings when she wasn’t performing at her best. That isn’t what I meant but now it’s out there, it must be the case, it must be. Yet you don’t think Victoria Wood ever gave a bad performance and nor do I.

I do think some of her pastiche parodies were thin and stretched but I have her Chunky book and the script to Pat and Margaret on my shelves here and I just won’t ever write as well as she does. Sorry. As she did. This is a hard year.