scriptwriting

Scene and not seen

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This was hard for me. I ran a workshop about scriptwriting last weekend and I was required to teach a group of teenage writers how to format scripts. I did try telling them to just get it right, but for some reason they wanted more detail.

Look, you know and I know that scripts are laid out in certain formats and they are different to prose fiction, you would never accidentally write in these layouts. What you would do is read scripts. Read enough scripts, you get it. Film scripts are pretty rigidly formatted, television comes in a couple of different forms, radio is bit more relaxed and theatre is a Wild West.

But read scripts, you get it.

I don’t expect any writer to happen to know the millimetre dimensions of every indent, but I will not accept a writer who thinks it doesn’t matter. Who thinks script formats are solely done because there’s some secret club that has agreed it all.

Instead, scripts are laid out in their various ways for very specific reasons, all of which are long-won over decades of you writing and other people making the show out of that script. Some poor sod will count your INT for interior scenes and your EXT for exterior, for instance, as they try to balance the budget between days of location filming versus building studio sets.

There are reasons, they’re practical, none of this is hard. So what I told the group was that if you send me a script and it isn’t laid out correctly, really you are telling me to stop reading. Rather than showing me you’re a free spirit who won’t be confined by arbitrary layouts, you’re shouting that you don’t read scripts.

There’s no reason you should read scripts, unless you want to write them. If you do and yet still can’t be arsed to read any, I struggle to see why I should read yours. You could be a natural, brilliant talent, but you’re not. Get it right, I said to this group, because it’s not as if it’s hard, and read scripts because you’re a scriptwriter, you’re surely interested in your own field.

However.

I also explicitly told them that I know instantly when you’ve got a format wrong. I know from the first glance, before I’ve read a word, I know it’s wrong. I said it was that obvious.

It turns out that I lied.

I still believe what I said and I obviously didn’t set out to lie to them, but something happened shortly before the workshop and something happened shortly afterwards. What makes it worse is that it was the same something.

It was that I read the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship” by Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane, distantly based on the book by William Brinkley. I enjoyed it very much, I bought the episode off iTunes to watch, and then I bought the next episode, then I bought the season. By the time of the workshop, I think I’d seen six episodes and the day after, I re-read the script.

So there I am, barrelling along, enjoying it again, seeing the differences between the draft and the final production, having a fine time.

Until I noticed that it has no scenes.

There isn’t a single scene heading and I hadn’t noticed. I’d got so caught up in the reading that despite all the rest of the format being full-on script, I completely failed to notice that there wasn’t one single INT or EXT in 54 pages. When I did notice, around 30 pages into the re-read, I went back to the start and checked it out in case I were mad or the copy of the script I got was peculiarly incomplete.

It wasn’t. Rather than say what you’d expect, such as:

EXT. FLIGHT DECK – DAY

the script instead says:

CUT TO
XO MIKE SLATTERY (40’s) walking on the FLIGHT DECK, crossing with NAVY SEALS DANNY GREEN and FRANKIE BENZ (both 20’s). He shakes Danny’s hand.

I do feel for the poor sod working out the budget, but then the great majority of the script is set on a ship which appears to clearly be a real one shot on location. So I suppose that one big EXT is somewhat implied.

There’s no lesson here, certainly not for you because you didn’t sit down to get lectured at, but also not for me. I was wrong about seeing deviations from the format instantly. I lied to those teenage writers. But I’ll lie in the same way again, I’ll always write INT and EXT. But I was wrong.

It’s just that instead of instantaneously recognising something was off, it took me one and a half reads of the entire script to notice. Instead of seeing it on page one, then, it effectively took me 84 pages.

I’m suddenly reminded of when novelist Paul Auster stopped writing chapters. I can’t remember which novel it was now – I want to say Oracle Night – but the entire book is a single chapter, just as this script is a single scene. With the novel, it was oddly compelling. I don’t understand how, except that late at night, figuring I’ll just read to the end of this chapter, I was a bit tense.

“The Last Ship” script is an exciting, absorbing read. My concern for the poor budgeting sod is too great for me to ever try abandoning scenes, but it is true that ditching them makes this feel like a faster read, that it pulls you through instead of pausing to plant an INT or EXT flag.

Going commando

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I love that if the phrase “going commando” means anything to you, it’s because of Friends. One joke in one episode of one sitcom has had major repercussions. (And if you just saluted military man Major Repercussions, we can thank the writers of How I Met Your Mother.)

But that’s not why we’re here. I want to boast at you about my fantastic writing – and then puncture that with the truth. I learned a lesson this week and I think it is so key that I would have vowed to you that I learned it two decades ago plus I’ve practiced it daily since then.

Yet apparently not.

The lesson is that writing can be extraordinarily concise, that you can do a huge amount in an instant. And that since you can, you must. You’re talking to a fella who wrote for BBC Ceefax, the news service that makes Twitter seem spacious, and I’m still learning to be more concise.

Actually, let me quickly throw in this, let me say “here endeth the lesson” because a) I’ve always wanted to write those words and 2) I want to tell you a Ceefax story that has just popped back into my head. (The a) and 2) line comes from Paul Reiser and other writers on Mad About You. This is also not what we’re here to talk about.)

Anyway. On one of my earliest days on the Ceefax Entertainment desk, I was assigned to write the Blue Peter pages. I can’t remember the details now, but it was something about how every episode the children’s series then featured various things you could make and Ceefax ran around a dozen pages detailing it.

Being new and not knowing any better, I wrote it all in two pages.

I can see my editor standing over my shoulder with the printed out email from the Blue Peter office, pointing at some detail and saying “But what about this – oh, that is in there.” It all was. Given that I am now starting to drag this story out, I maintain that I am Mr Concise.

Except I do a weekly YouTube series called 58keys and I script it. I’m a scriptwriter, it’s what I do. And this week’s edition had a lovely title that I planned –– “Looking for AirTags in All the Wrong Places” — plus a lesson I didn’t.

AirTags are this new teeny tracker you put on your keyring or in your car or on your luggage. If you lose the keyring, the car or the luggage, your iPhone will tell you precisely where they are. Under the right conditions, precisely means really scarily precisely.

So I know this is an obvious gag, but I scripted an opening where I “lost” an AirTag and then had to go searching for it. Here’s what I scripted for the opening 50 seconds or so, including titles.

INT. OFFICE – DAY
ME: Right, two things to say. First, hello, I’m William Gallagher and this is 58keys which is for writers like you and me who use Macs, iPhones and iPads. Do subscribe. Second, AirTags. Just buy one.

HOLD UP EMPTY AIR

ME: “Get an AirTag and you will never again lose – well, anything.” [“REALISE” YOU DON’T HAVE AN AIRTAG.] Oh.

EXT. GARDEN – DAY

Crawl commando-style over the grass, using your iPhone to find the AirTag on your key ring.

– SHOT ONE: your keys in the grass. Then iPhone with “Here” and you picking them up
– SHOT TWO: commando-style close up of you hunting
– SHOT THREE: overhead view of you picking them up

That’s pretty concise. But the way I set it up, the first thing I filmed out in my garden was Shot Two. I filmed that, then I was on my back, squinting in the sunlight as I checked what I’d got –– and I knew.

I knew that I didn’t need Shot One. Or Shot Three. The whole story, the whole gag, was there in Shot Two and in fact in exactly five seconds from the middle of it. So I didn’t bother to film those other two shots.

You can watch it, you can see for yourself.

I hope you think it’s funny, I expect you’ll think I look like an eejit, but I know with total certainty that you will agree it does the job I set out to do. The script has one scene with three shots and a total of 278 words of description.

But I showed it all, conveyed it all in five seconds.

Another lesson I learned, incidentally, is that it’s surprisingly hard to do that commando-style crawl across your garden. I don’t see that lesson sticking with me as much as the concise writing one, mind.

AirTag

Playing tag

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This is just tickling me today. It’s early Friday morning and before you and I even start to talk, I have already looked up the tracking information for a parcel that’s due this afternoon. I’m getting a delivery of AirTags for a work thing, I’ll be writing non-fiction about them as soon as they’re here. These AirTags come out today and they mean I’ll never again lose my keys or my car. And one day when we can all travel again, they mean I can stand in JFK and know precisely which room my luggage is in back at Heathrow.

But for now, for today, this means that I am currently tracking the delivery of tracking devices.

I know our lives are riddled with technology and that having an AirTag on my keyring is yet another example of that. Given years of development and doubtlessly millions of dollars of investment, it feels like a pretty big hammer to solve the nut of my wondering where my keys are once a year. It’s like how I once saw a video about how tin foil is made and, I tell you, my sandwiches are not worth that effort.

Maybe this is just me, but it feels as if we always think of technology as this huge force that impinges on us. Hopefully for good, doubtlessly sometimes for bad, but it’s this thing that presses into us. I believe, though, that rather than some impersonal single force, technology is incredibly, just incredibly illustrative of the specific people who make it.

So for instance I was once hired to work for a day in a client’s office but the PC they put me on decided to update Windows. Three hours I sat there, being paid I suppose but acutely embarrassed that I wasn’t getting the work done and increasingly conscious that the deadline was becoming painful. But screw me and my work, Windows wanted updating so Windows is gonna update. At long, long length.

That does tell me something about myself and my capacity for foul language, but it also vividly conveys to me what it is like to be someone who works at Microsoft. Everyone is different, obviously, but seemingly no one at Microsoft gives enough of a stuff about what its customers need to do. To me, then the entire, massive Microsoft corporation has a personality and I don’t like it.

I know people who loathe Apple, too, but to me the difference is that people there take a minute longer to think. I realise I’m comparing two faceless corporations who in reality surely don’t care about me. But when a Mac needs to be updated, it asks you first. Can it do that now or are you busy? One question, one thought, a world of difference in the personality.

Then if you follow Facebook, I mean as a company, it’s been hard lately to not see that gigantic organisation as a petty teenager. I’ve got so into this that this week’s 58keys, my YouTube series about technology for writers, threw out all the technology and instead took a writer’s view of examining Facebook’s tantrums.

I think that technology also shines a little light on actual individuals, actual human beings, too. Take these AirTags, for instance. When they were announced, I know plenty of people whose first and maybe only thought was hmm, must be Bluetooth LE, probably a U1 processor, got to be leveraging the network of iPhones in the world.

And my first thought was how they could be used to track people.

They can’t really, by the way. I’m embarrassed quite how much I’ve thought this through, reasonably worrying about domestic abuse victims but also excitedly thinking up thriller plots. But I’m impressed by quite how much Apple has thought it through before me. I can just about see a way to do it, to plant an AirTag on someone and follow them, but it is ludicrously complicated, depends on so many coincidences in a row, and I cannot see a way to prevent you being caught pretty soon.

An AirTag is a tiny thing, about the size of a coin, and yet it’s also therefore this huge illustration of a marriage of technology and people. I’m certain it isn’t easy to think up the technology, but we’ve seen a lot of examples where seemingly it was easy to stop thinking once the tech was done, to not think further into how it will be used.

I am biased here because technology is how I get to talk to you. But for my entire writing career, I’ve had one foot in technology and one foot in drama. I used to think that it was just because my handwriting is so bad that I have to use keyboards, but now I’m wondering if really the two sides are not different at all.

Plus if I don’t spend today tracking my tracking devices, I’ll spend it metaphorically eating chocolate. So there’s that.

#Relax

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So the lack of chocolate is now making me shake, but fortunately it’s a metaphorical lack even if it’s a real shake. Anyway, it’s enough that I’ve been hearing about this relaxation thing and figuring now is a good time to give it a try.

For everything I do, I lean on a bionic To Do app called OmniFocus. If you want to, you can put tags on the tasks you pop into that. I have a tag called #pressing, for instance, and when there’s a spare moment, I’ll tap on that and see everything that’s making my stomach learn what a reef knot feels like. Or less problematically, I’ve got a tag called #email. Whatever the project, whatever the job, whatever the deadline, I can tap on that tag and see a list of emails I need to send to get something done. Again, spare moment, knock a couple of those off.

Earlier this week, though, I heard a podcast that suggested creating a tag called #relax.

Okay.

That’s three days ago now and I’ve made this #relax tag, but I’ve nothing in it.

There’s reading, I could pop reading into the list. And I do read a script every day, but as enjoyable as that is most of the time –– I have read some stinkers lately –– it is a kind of work. I have just finished a novel I liked and am tempted by the sequel, plus I am reading an autobiography that’s a delight. But they’re both tangentially related to work, to the extent that it’s hard to separate them from a writing project.

I did just call out to thin air, “Hey, Siri, play something I’ll like,” and the room filled with music. That was good. Except the first track was Mike Oldfield and he’s pro-Brexit. And the second was by The Corrs, at least one quarter of whom is a climate-change-coronavirus denier.

None of this stops me liking the two tracks –– “Moonlight Shadow” and “Bring on the Night” –– but, come on, Brexit and COVID. Not exactly #relax.

I have been watching even more TV drama than usual lately, but again that’s a little work related. I read all 24 of the scripts in one series and then watched the episodes, trying to understand how it was irritatingly written and yet compelling at the same time.

Yesterday I did also look at a sign for a gym, but you know I’m a bit more likely to run away to the circus.

Long walks. How long are we talking, exactly? Heading out in the sunshine: tricky, since if it’s daylight, I’m working.

I don’t drink, I’m not a gamer, there is no sport in the world that I’d sit through voluntarily. And Strictly isn’t back for months.

I do get to talk to you, mind. Which is why this is headed #relax. That’s one thing on the list, then. Great: job done, now what’s #pressing?

Weight for it

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I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t waiting for something, some result, some decision, even just something to render. But you can be waiting for precisely the same amount of time and one is heavier than the other.

Yes, I’m waiting on something. How could you tell?

I think there are two ways to wait for something without it pressing down on you. No, hang on, call it three: you could also just not care about whatever it is. That does happen and surprisingly often: you pitched for something and know that if you got it, it would be great, but if you don’t, it’s a shrug.

Of the two ways I was originally thinking about, one of them is actually quite similar. Whether you want it or not, you make yourself forget it as if you’re don’t care. This works so rarely that I can actually count the number of times it’s worked out. On both occasions, I would get updates from the people I was waiting for, and apologies for various delays, but on both occasions I was fine. The total certainty that it wasn’t going to happen, that I wasn’t going to get it, meant I could cheerily reply and shed it all from my mind a moment later.

That can’t be the usual thing of thinking you won’t get it because you somehow don’t deserve it, though. Instead, it has to be from the cold producer part of your head, the part where you can see the project from the other peoples’ perspective. For instance, I remember very clearly having a great time at a kind of interview for a gig once and as I walked out, poet Jean Atkin walked in.

Bugger, I thought, even I would hire her over me for this particular job. If they have any sense, I knew, it was her gig and rightly so. They had sense.

Actually, now I think of it, there was another time few years ago when I ended up on a train with poet Bethany Rivers after we’d both pitched for the same work, I came to the same conclusion and I was right, she correctly got the gig, but I also remember this now. She got off the train a stop before me and between her station and mine, I got an email offering me work. It wasn’t as well paid but it was more me and to this day, I’m still involved with that and Bethany is still with that gig.

You may choose to take this as meaning that you never know when you’ll get a commission. I prefer to think of it as a warning that I should never go up against poets.

Anyway, that kind of practical assessment, that’s what I need in order to constructively believe I’m not going to get the thing I’m waiting for. When I don’t run into the competition, it’s harder to make these assessments but, for instance, there was one where I could even see legal hurdles and certainly contractual ones over booking me compared to some unknown other writer. It was complicated. Mind you, I got that one.

I don’t know who else is in the running for this thing I’m waiting on now, and I have no capability of making an assessment over my chances because it isn’t a numbers game. It isn’t me or someone else, it could be me and someone else, it could be no one. Yet this is something like the fourth or fifth step in this particular project’s process and the first three were a complete lightweight doddle to wait for. Lightwait, that’s what I should call them. No expectations, coupled to plenty of awareness that it was all going to be steadily delayed by the coronavirus issues anyway.

I sailed through those waiting times, merrily replying to apologies for delays and having the entire thing vacate my mind again the instant I hit Send.

Not now. Not so much.

Yet there is this other way I’ve got of handling waiting. What I do is –– I don’t. I don’t wait.

There’s nothing I can do to speed up a decision that’s entirely out of my hands, but I am in complete control of what else I do while I’m waiting. And what I am fortunately finding works once more is that I get out there and pitch for something else. Somethings else, many, many somethings elses.

This has gone wrong before. I’ve ended up getting the thing I was waiting for and also every single one of the other things I pitched to do in order to distract myself. It made for an extremely busy period, but if you have a way to make me be that overstretched all the time, I have a limb I want to interest you in.

There is a fourth thing. I promise I wasn’t holding this back, I’ve just been staring at everything I’ve said to you and wondering about the undertow, the way that you know this particular wait is hard. But saying it all to you, I don’t know, it somehow reminds me.

I can count how often I’ve had certain lightwaits and I can’t count how many times I’ve had to wait for something. It’s just that somewhere between twice and countless, it is astounding how many times I’ve been hired by people after they’ve first rejected me.

Repeat this after me so that I can hear you and get it into my head. Rejection is not automatically the end, even when it’s a rejection that matters to you. It’s at least often the start. And if I cannot tell you yet what all of this is about, I want to tell you that it does feel like a new start in a new area. It feels like I’m in a new game, it just seems to come laden with the same waiting weight that all my previous writing work has combined.

I’ll let you know as soon as I can. Although if I appear fixated on chocolate the next time we speak, don’t press.

Too many notes

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I read a review the other day where the opening line praised a particular drama for being unlike anything else on television. And then the second line said it was a remake of a French TV show.

I’m not going to say that it is this kind of review that makes me mentally downgrade television critics, but if you wanted to think that right now, I wouldn’t object. I remember giving up reading a particularly famous reviewer because after months of repeatedly despairing that there was nothing new on television, ripped apart a show for being different.

Anyway.

Lately I seem to have been reading more reviews where there are what, to me, seem equally ridiculous claims. Most often it’s this: such and such a show is terrible, but this or that actor is great in it.

You cannot separate an actor from the writing or the direction or, I offer, anything else in a production. An actor does not come in and make up their own lines. Writers do not write dreadfully for every character bar one. The director did not tell one actor the piece is a serious historical crime drama and leave the rest thinking it’s farce.

Certainly, unquestionably, some actors are far better than others and certainly one actor may be more right for a particular role than another. I love that only in this circumstance can you genuinely have gradations of right. This actor is more right than this one.

But back to the point. You cannot separate an actor’s performance from the character they are playing. Not from the role, not from the script, not from direction. Every single element of a drama is working together –– or not –– as a whole and none of it can be separated out.

Except the script. You can read the script without any director or cast. Er, also costume design, now I think about it. Considering how badly I dress, it’s remarkable how interesting I think costuming is. A highlight of Strictly Come Dancing for me is the Thursday slot on It Takes Two when designer Vicky Gill talks about costumes. The sheer artistry of the pen sketches she and her team makes, the artwork that is thrown away because it is a step on the route to the final costume instead of a piece of work itself. That reminds me a lot of scripts: they are tools to get you to the finishing line, the production. That they’re amazing on the page is a bonus that few people, compared to the millions viewing, will ever see or even care to see.

I just like how you can look at costumes out of context and you can read scripts by themselves too. But all of this is on my mind today because this week I bought two TV series and in context, both of them have the wrong music.

It turns out that this is something else you can separate from a show: its soundtrack. I should realise that as I used to have an awful lot of soundtrack albums back when there were albums.

I hope I have realised before that music can be enjoyed without the rest of the show. But I am certain I never realised how music is about the only element that can be changed after the fact.

And often is.

Intellectually, I knew for instance that WKRP in Cincinnati had problems with the music used in the show’s radio station setting, and I gathered that the DVD replaced them. But now I’ve bought the second season of Sports Night and I did so in part because the opening of that season begins with track that’s become a favourite. She Will Have Her Way, by Neil Finn, is an unusual choice for the start of a sitcom and it plays out over a very extended sequence. It’s played out very well, so well that I started that episode just to hear it and to see how perfectly it fits.

It perfectly fit alright, but it also perfectly came out again. On the version of Sports Night that you can buy in the US iTunes Store, that song has been replaced entirely by a track called Valentine by Tim Cullen. It’s mostly played over a montage but there are points when those scenes are audible, so this isn’t just someone playing the track loudly, it’s the episode’s audio remixed to remove one track and insert another.

You know that took effort, I imagine it took care. But, sorry Tim Cullen and whoever did this edit, it’s wrong. I’ve remembered the right track for 20 years now and I was actually a little crestfallen that something I think worked so well was now altered.

And then the UK iTunes Store only went and had a sale on the original Magnum, pi. I could talk to you about that show for several hours longer than you’d put with, but forget television history, it’s just a very good series.

If you know it, you have the theme in your head at this moment and may even know that it’s by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter. What you are less likely to know is that the theme you’ll have for the rest of today is not the original theme to the show. The original, by the same writers, is just a bit ordinary, a bit flat, compared to what you know. The tune you know was incidental music, possibly end titles music, and it was so for the first several episodes.

Changing it to make it the main theme back in 1981 was a good move and I truly believe helped become a show a hit on the air. Changing it in 2018 when it went onto iTunes, well… unfortunately I’m afraid I think that was a good idea too. I wish I didn’t, I feel my entire point evaporating in front of you.

But there it is. The iTunes digital release has been edited to put the famous theme tune on the start of even the pilot.

You can’t rewrite the past. But you can re-score it. So of all the elements of a drama that can exist outside that drama, the script and the costumes can have a kind of life of their own. But only the music can be replaced later.

Four out of Tenet

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I don’t want to review Tenet, I want to say that it is the most difficult film to understand that I can remember -– just not in the way I believe writer/director Christopher Nolan would presumably want. Tenet is not the mind-bending, brain-swelling complex tale of time travel that its trailer would have you believe, it’s just bloody loud.

That’s what I want to talk to you about. And yes, I did go through a spell of thinking I’m simply getting old and deaf, but that’s not it. As I realised, when I gave up on the film about two thirds of the way through and instead read the screenplay.

Read that script and you will find the sound and fury cover up a lot of nothing. The dialogue that you didn’t quite catch turns out to be mostly pretty pedestrian exposition. Then the lead character’s name is actually “Protagonist”, which seems like it explains why you don’t especially care whether he lives or dies, since clearly Nolan didn’t either.

The time travel stuff does look fantastic on the screen but turns out to be just as irritatingly simplistic on the page as you had begun to suspect. Some people from the future are waging war on us, the people in their past. It makes for some marvellous visuals as certain characters are moving forward in time while their enemies are moving backwards through it.

Of course, if people in the future kill everybody in their past, they’re fucked. Tenet admits this and gives us a wee lecture on the Grandfather Paradox, but then shrugs it off completely. A character with an actual name says that, well, yes, no, that’s a bit of an enormous plot hole, you’re right, but it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s just a movie, don’t worry about it. Or he effectively says that, having actually shrugged it off in a way that says we’re stupid for spotting it, move on.

That’s one of a handful of incidents that emphasise the fact that this is a film, moments which jump you out of the story and into being aware of the artifice. Yet according to Nolan, who always sounds so bemused that anyone could want to hear his films, this is part of the experience. Simplistic plots dressed up as complex ones, dialogue you cannot hear, it doesn’t matter, because it’s all an Experience.

I actually like dialogue that you can’t hear. There’s a gorgeous scene in the Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk with Me, where we cannot make out what people are saying in a nightclub. All these years later I can’t really remember just how it felt in the cinema, but I think I recall straining to hear while finding it arresting, compelling, even scary. Plus I remember it then being funny when the DVD came out and people discovered that there were optional subtitles for every word.

That scene was deliberately impossible to hear, and equally, Christopher Nolan deliberately chose to have the Tenet audio be so poor.

He’s done more than that, he’s also chosen to criticise people for saying they can’t hear a thing. He’s said that he consciously decided that he would have the audio mix be right for only the very finest cinemas — and he’s then also complained about cinemas getting it wrong.

I don’t believe that anyone can complain about a writer’s artistic intention. Choices made, decisions taken, it’s up to the writer/director what they do. It’s just not up to them whether we like it or not, whether we’re happy at the money it cost to buy the film, or the taste of the aspirin afterwards.

Nolan’s dismissal of this particular criticism is irritating, and it does contribute to how right now I think I’ve had enough. I have never chosen to see a film because of who directed it, or who stars in it, and only occasionally because of who wrote it. Always and forever, it is the story that does or doesn’t attract me, so I’m sure there will be a future Christopher Nolan film where I do want to watch.

When I know he wrote and made it, though, that will stop me rushing.

And I see little chance that I’ll ever watch the final third or so of Tenet.

I do believe that writing is for the audience, not for the writer, but I’m also aware that there are many different audiences. Just because I don’t like something, it obviously doesn’t mean you won’t, and I would argue that Nolan has to have the right to make the films he wants. Considering that he gets to make films when others don’t, he should surely be making the films he wants. It’s a bit of a waste if he’s getting the commissions instead of other writers and then he’s just knocking out something without care or choice or decisions.

Except.

There is still a line somewhere. There is a line between hoping to connect with audience and instead, choosing to irritate them seemingly solely because you can. Antagonise me, upset me, challenge me, but don’t piss me off and make think I should’ve bought Wonder Woman 1984 instead.

But, hey, Christopher Nolan is pretty much infinitely more successful than I am so I’m going to take a telling and apply the same thinking to my work.

Yes.

My next play will be staged in a locked, sound-proofed room with no windows, and I will charge you to stand outside it for two and a half hours.

Don’t look at me like that. I suddenly want to tall it The Tenet of Wildfell Hall. But whatever it’s name and however little you can see of it, I know it will be an Experience.

Je ne comprends pas, but…

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It’s possible that you’ve noticed this, but the UK — or perhaps more correctly England, yet the whole nation is getting clobbered by it — is going through a protracted period of withdrawing from the world. I don’t think it’s planned, I see it as schoolboys folding their arms and believing everyone will come begging. But whatever is ultimately behind it, the result is that we’re more isolated and more turning our backs on everywhere else — except on television.

This week I saw Call My Agent for the first time and it is a delight, I’m feeling warm just mentioning it to you. I’m a single episode in and yet I’m already intending to eke out the series as the whole run isn’t all that long and I want to relish it.

And at the same time, I am regularly checking online to see when the next episodes of Lupin are available.

These are both French television dramas, both on Netflix. Other foreign language dramas are available and always have been, but not to the extent they are now. I’ve long been a sucker for subtitles: back when you used to flick through channels instead of menus of shows, if I caught something with a subtitle, I was locked in to the end because I had to read what came next. Had to.

But that was always late night on BBC2 or BBC4, and now high-budget, high-profile subtitled or dubbed foreign-language dramas are getting 70 million viewers.

Now, that 70 million is the figure for Lupin. Netflix rarely reveals figures unless they’re particularly good. It’s a curious thing about streaming video: none of the companies are required to publish their ratings, so none of them do until they’ve got a headline-worthy one. Even then, nobody can verify them.

And of course the 70 million for Lupin is a worldwide figure. Netflix hasn’t mentioned that the show apparently isn’t as popular in France as it is everywhere else, and Netflix certainly hasn’t said how many viewers were in the UK.

I think that’s actually part of how we’re seeing global dramas now. Netflix would presumably like a lot of viewers in the UK, but it doesn’t matter the way it used to. The UK doesn’t matter the way it used to. The UK used to be hugely important because it was a big importer of English-language television. The UK is the reason Australia’s Neighbours soap kept going for decades. It’s one of the reasons that America’s 1980s Fame lasted four more years in syndication after NBC cancelled its network television run.

I think that the just as network television is vanishing, so the idea of different territories for selling TV shows to is being erased. It’s not there yet, we still have BBC making daytime dramas that are really produced to be shown in primetime in other countries, specifically ones where rosy cosy images of England sell well.

But overall, television drama is on its way to becoming global and instead of that meaning everything becoming a bit more bland, a bit more safe, a bit more homogeneous, we’re somehow getting to see tremendous dramas we never used to. I can’t think of a time in British television history where we had French and Spanish dramas available on demand, where there actually is demand for them, or where foreign-language shows are being talked about as much as these are.

So as Britain tries to pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist and anyway will can’t survive without us, we in the UK are getting to see more of the globe through the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+.

Except.

While I utterly love this, while I think it is fantastic that a great series can now punch far higher and wider than ever before, it’s not an accident. There is an element of how streaming services need libraries of material and here’s some material, let’s add that to the pile.

But it’s really because there is a quota.

I wrote an article about this in 2019 which reported that by the end of 2020, all streaming services would be required to have 30% of their libraries made locally. So if you’re an American service, as they all are, but you want to operate in France, you have to have 30% of your archive be made in that country.

Now, there are ways to fiddle this. Co-productions, co-financing, it all makes the country of origin be a little debatable. But back in 2019, the article I was commissioned to write was focusing on how, at the time, none of the services met the quota.

Netflix and Amazon Prime were close so I imagine they’ve made it. At the time, the then-new Apple TV+ looked like only about 6-7% of its small library was European. And Disney+ was believed to have 4.7%. I don’t know if they caught up and I can’t seem to find out, but it must’ve been a struggle.

Although I did think of a solution for them. Since the required quota was a percentage of their library, you can see how they could each fiddle the figures. Just remove a hell of a lot of shows from the European versions of Netflix, Amazon, Apple and so on. There are already extensive differences between the libraries available in any given country, because of rights and contractual issues. So I’m honestly surprised they don’t appear to have done that because it’s a lot easier to take a show off your list than it is to make or buy more series.

Instead, while I don’t have figures for this part, it does seem as if the services have bought, made, or co-produced more series to meet this quota.

And it definitely seems that this has worked for them in more than just box-ticking legal-form quota requirements. Now that we are seeing foreign-language series and these streaming services are seeing that we’re seeing them, we’re going to get more. We’ll get more because these shows are popular, not because they fit a criteria.

That’s the bit I love. Show people new drama and it works. We are now seeing more global hits that are a success not because their good bits are ironed out to make them palatable globally or because they’re the TV equivalent of Easy Listening. We’re seeing them because they are fresh and great and they are showing us parts of the world we perhaps didn’t see, even when we were part of the EU.

I love, I deeply love how I’ve ended up in massive conversations about Il Ministero Del Tempo, a Spanish time-travel series. It makes me so happy that the conversations were never about the fact that it’s in Spanish, they were always about how such a great show shot itself in the foot so badly with one episode that we all stopped watching the series.

Drama is bringing us together even as other factors are keeping us apart. Writing is bringing us together and it is reaching out across nations and languages. It is so great.

Except.

I said there was a quota. It’s a European Union quota.

We in the UK are benefiting from an EU quota not because we’re part of the European Union, not because we have any say anymore, but because as far as all streaming services are concerned, we just don’t matter. Nobody’s going to go whoo-hoo, we can have less than 30% locally-produced shows in the UK, they’re just going to lump us in with the rest of the continent.

The world is global regardless of what the UK, or perhaps most specifically England, seems to think.

I can get a bit miserable about the state of the nation and the state of politics, but if the UK is sidelining itself, at least I’ve got 23 more episodes of Call My Agent and another half a season of Lupin to relish.

The standard wasn’t so high, the decision wasn’t so difficult

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Whether it’s when an awards ceremony announces its nominees or when the judges email to say you haven’t been selected, it is seemingly a contractual obligation that they open with “the standard of entries was so high”. On pain of death, they will then also say that the judges “had to make a very difficult decision”.

It just isn’t always true.

Sometimes it’s not even close.

I can’t count now the number of times I’ve either been a judge or in some way involved in an awards ceremony, and thankfully there are times when all of this was thoroughly accurate and true. That just occasionally took some work.

The single most useful thing I’ve ever done in any award judging was fiddle a category. I remember a book award jury where we were all a bit deflated because the one that was going to win in a particularly prestigious category was fine. It was okay. We’d all said sure, it gets through to the next stage. But it was sitting there on the table, at the top of the pile in this category, up there less from merit and more from attrition, and you just could not see yourself proclaiming that it was the greatest book in the year.

As it happened, though, a completely separate category had a couple of titles where you would’ve been happy to proclaim that. And I was the one who spotted that the very best of those was only in its category because that’s what its publisher had entered it for. It could equally have been entered into this other prestigious category so I proposed we move it.

And we did. That book moved from one category to another and, totally deservedly, won that more prestigious prize. I still wonder if the publisher spent any time wondering whether he or she had made a mistake on the entry form. But it was such a good book that I wish I could tell you its name.

On the other hand, I’ve been in awards where there was no such option and while the winner was certainly the best, that wasn’t saying much at all. I remember one theatre awards in particular where all ten judges, or however many it was, agreed instantly that there was only a single possible contender for either of the two awards on offer. We were off in this side room, meeting to discuss all of the short plays we’d just seen, and before the biscuits even arrived, we knew the winner.

We just didn’t like it.

The play that won both awards that night was utterly superb, so very much better than anything else in the night — until its last two minutes. Those last two minutes destroyed the play. And yet it had to win, there was nothing else close.

So that writer had a brilliant night, collecting two awards for her play. But both she and at least some of the audience went away thinking right, I need to write great dramas with exceptionally crap endings.

I tell you now, I’m ahead of the game here. I write plays that are crap from start to finish.

Let me tell you a happier tale. No, two happier tales: I was at the Writers’ Guild Awards in January 2020 when I saw the writers of Danger Mouse arrive. I can see me there on the steps, coming within one pixel of greeting them with congratulations because I already knew they’d won. Again, it was a deserved win, too, they had written a gem of an episode that is making me smile just telling you about it.

It’s a little unusual to know the winner, though, even when you’ve been involved. I knew with that book because I was at the final meeting, and I knew about Danger Mouse because I was presenting something else and had been there for the run through.

But even when you’re a judge, you often don’t know the final outcome. If you don’t happen to know how judging works, what always happens is that it starts with the writer or producer or someone submits their work. That gets studied and reviewed and poked at, and then if it’s good enough it becomes an official nomination. Then in various different ways it will be sent to multiple judges who’ll typically come back with their list of favourites, why they liked it so much, and so on. Then there’ll be another round or two whittling it down, arguing, debating and so on, until ultimately there is a winner.

Quite often, unless you’re involved in that very last stage, you can know full well what you voted for but not know who actually won.

Which is why at a previous Writers’ Guild award, I can remember crossing my fingers during the theatre category. And when Frances Poet won for her play Gut, I punched the air and called out “Yes!” sufficiently loudly to be a little embarrassed.

But come on, seeing tremendous work honoured, seeing utterly superb drama writing held up to the light for more people to see, it is fantastic.

It’s just rarely all that difficult a decision.

It has got so that when I hear “the standard was so high”, I think yeah, right, sure. And when I hear “the judges made the difficult decision” I’ve actually felt a bit patronised. It doesn’t matter what the awards are, whether I’m involved, the standard lines just always sound flat. Maybe we should have a Best Awards Award to make up for it.

If we did, I’d be nominating any ceremony hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Fey is a writing hero to me anyway, but just go on YouTube and watch those two hosting over the years.

Funny I should say that now, though. Because I wanted to talk to you about all of this, it was all on my mind, specifically because of the next awards ceremony that, as it happens, they are going to host. They’ll front the Golden Globes again this year and, no doubt, will be superb.

I just don’t think the awards themselves can be.

Look, there were somewhere between 400 and 500 new television dramas or comedies last year, I can’t expect my favourites to all be nominated. And I’m fine with Emily in Paris getting a nomination even though I preferred reading the script, I enjoyed it more on the page than on the screen.

But shows like I May Destroy You are not nominated. That show belongs in a new category of dramas I’m daunted to watch. It’s a Sin is in there too.

Yet its exclusion from the Golden Globes, the US equivalent of the UK’s television BAFTAs, seems peculiar. It seems like the Mona Lisa failing to get a nomination in the award for Best Mona Lisa.

Alan Plater, who won so many awards that I remember this whole cabinet he had of them, said to me once that you can’t take awards too seriously, though.

“Don’t let the BAFTAs grind you down,” he said.

Learning a lesson from writing 50 scripts

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I think it’s 50. Today is the one year anniversary of my 58keys series on YouTube and it has 57 videos, of which I’m pretty sure the majority were scripted. Call it 50.

While we’re calling it, and as I want to build up some suspense over what this one great lesson is that I believe I’ve learned in the last year, let me call some more numbers. I’ve produced 57 episodes for a total of 13 hours, 1 minute and 54 seconds of video. Some 27,613 people have watched for a total of 2,236 hours and I have 781 subscribers.

Yes, if you look at the first episode and compare it to the most recent ones, you can tell which is better. It’s not as radical an improvement as I’d expected, mind. But I’m choosing to believe that this is because the early ones were fine, not that the later ones aren’t.

There were also something like 7 pilot versions. We will not speak of that again.

Oh, except that there was a lesson I learned from the pilots, which isn’t the Big Overall Writing Lesson I want to tell you about, but I think was still pretty big. I spent ages, like two minutes out of the ten, in the pilots of 58keys explaining who I am and why I believed I could make a useful series for writers who use Macs, iPhones and iPads.

The lesson I learned from that part was that nobody cares and nor should they. If I talk utter rubbish, then having a track record doesn’t make it right. Concentrate on saying something useful, that’s the job, that was the little big lesson from the pilots.

Whereas the Big Overall Writing Lesson from a year and something like 50 scripts is this.

Get on with it.

Writing half ideas, having stories you never finish, planning to write some day, you know the thing, there’s no point to it. I found a scrap of video I’d shot around ten years ago when I first had the idea to do a series. It’s not great. It’s not bad either. What it is, is a decade old.

Similarly, I like the title sequence in 58keys but I shot that whole thing around August 2019 and didn’t start the series for another five months.

Have an idea, then make it happen. Write the idea now, this minute, and if it’s rubbish, write something else.

Mind you, if it’s brilliant, save it and then still write something else.

Incidentally, the fastest I’ve ever done an episode of 58keys –– I mean from idea to edited video uploading to YouTube –– is 90 minutes. The slowest is four days. And so I did also learn this: if you want to write it, you can find the time.