russell t davies

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.

Why I left Radio Times

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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.

TV got better when I stopped reviewing it

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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.

Simply the best, ish, sort of, a bit

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There is something wrong with us. All of us. Even you. Don’t look at me like that. The internet has enabled people to mistype vitriol over what they don’t like and while you’re not like that, there is something of the opposite in you: if you like something, I think you can be loudly enthusiastic about it.

That’s surely no bad thing, except there is something in all of us that makes it easy to go too far. You can see it the most clearly with haters who will declare something on television to be the Worst. Episode. Ever.

There are people who stopped watching certain shows and regularly and proudly remind the world of this fact. The world could give a damn.

The world doesn’t give much of one when we like something either but I, for instance, cannot stop myself running up to you like an excited puppy when I see or read or hear something I think is wonderful.

I just think that there is a tendency for people who like things to need to further. It’s not enough that they enjoyed it, it has to be the Best Thing Ever. And there is a problem with that. It can affect the very thing you like.

I’m thinking of what happened after the original Star Trek series was cancelled in the 1960s. There was a lot to like about that show, there was enough to dislike, but really it was a lively action/adventure one-hour television drama. It engendered fans, though, and perhaps was the first example of really passionate and large-scale fandom, for most of whom it wasn’t enough to just enjoy the show.

I’m all for engagement and apparently there are scientists who went into their careers specifically because of Star Trek and I can’t comprehend how wonderful that is.

But the short version is that fans regarded Trek as important and by the time the first film based on the show was made, this attitude had infested the crew. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is pompous. Self-important. Boring. It’s also visually exquisite at times but there’s only so long you can stare at a painting.

Trek may be vulnerable to being pompous, though. I just read the screenplays for the first six of the movies and the worst of them, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, has a note on the title page. It’s a little lecture about the cosmos and how “the incredible beauty of this latest Star Trek voyage” is based in scientific reality. There should be an afterword explaining what the dialogue is based in.

Still, watch the last episode of the original TV show and then the first movie. I think the incredible difference is down to years of fans talking up the importance of Trek and its makers coming to believe them.

That’s one thing, but here’s another. The film flopped but it was so earthshakingly expensive that Paramount gambled on earning back some of the money by getting their TV division to make a sequel for six bucks.

They did and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is cheaper. (Based on the official budgets, this was made for a third of the price of the first one. ) Grab a Trek fan, ask him or her, and there’s a fair chance they’ll still say Star Trek II is the best of the films. There is definitely a vocal contingent that would say Best Film Ever.

Compared to the first movie, it is very good. It has life and action and smaller-scale yet higher stakes. And it has Ricardo Montalban.

But it’s a cartoon. The makers swung far the other way, doing everything to make a crowd-pleaser instead of an important statement about the future of humanity. And because it was a such a success, every Star Trek film until the 2009 JJ Abrams-led ones has had a certain similar tone. A bit flat. A bit empty.

I know I’m reducing the creative contribution of hundreds and maybe thousands of people down to generalities but, still, fans talked up Trek into a pompous misfire and then the course-correction resulted in a whole series of films that are popcorn.

I like popcorn. I’m just never going to say to you that it or anything else is the greatest thing ever.

Although I admit this all popped into my head because I’ve also just read Rose, the new Doctor Who novel by Russell T Davies and it is tremendous. Just the Best Thing Ever.