television

What I swear by

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If you’re going to swear in a drama, I think you should do it really early on in the episode. This is just a thought, obviously, but the only time I ever notice swearing is when it is in a drama and specifically when comes in late.

Well, there’s the famous scene in The Wire which has two detectives saying “fuck” in every possible connotation, expression and meaning, but after the first five or ten fucks you’re no longer watching detectives, you’re hearing the writer having a good time. And you do have to be a little conscious that Veronica Mars would’ve figured out the crime scene and be off again around an hour faster than these two.

I don’t tend to swear in real life and my problem with The Wire is not that it had swearing, it’s how the swearing in this specific scene broke the delicate little bubble that a drama lives in. There’s a moment in Star Trek: Picard where someone describes Jean-Luc Picard has having a fucking cheek, and it’s perfect. First swearing in 700-odd hours of Star Trek, and it’s perfect because she would say that, he did have a fucking cheek, it was actually a pinprick bursting a different kind of bubble and it’s possible that I may even have cheered. Certainly it helped me get into the story.

But although I remember that coming quite a bit into the episode, I also remember that it was one of the first things this particular character said. And I think that matters. To me, anyway.

There’s no special reason for why I don’t tend to swear, it’s not that I think I’m a family show or that I fear you’ll be shocked. I just don’t care about swearing and you wouldn’t, except it has caused problems. Countless times – okay, not very many but I definitely didn’t count them – a friend will, it seems to me, suddenly stop talking and apologise. It’s always because they’ve just sworn and they’ve somehow recognised that I don’t, but it’s also always, invariably, inescapably a mystery to me why they’re stopping.

If I had noticed the swearing, I wouldn’t care, but the reality is that I haven’t noticed. Now I sound like I don’t listen. But most of the time when people swear, it’s like small punctuation rather than some raging use of strong language. I am all for strong language, language should be strong, language is strong. So “Where did I leave my sodding keys,” just isn’t up there for strength.

Fine. That’s true in drama as well as real life, and my noticing Star Trek: Picard was less because it was the first swearword in – hang on, I can check this – yes, in 56 years of that show. It was more because it was right.

Only, I was watching a drama for work this week when, I think, about 15 minutes in, the lead character said “fuck”.

And it was not right. It jarred.

Apparently I can take it when an admiral curses at Starfleet Command in the 24th Century, but I can’t when a contemporary inner-city UK police officer does.

But it was wrong because, I think, it was said more for effect than anything else. There’s no way to know these things really, but I had such a strong sense that it was said explicitly to tell us that this was proper, grown-up drama.

And if you need to tell us that you’re proper, grown-up drama, well, you aren’t. Maybe that was really my problem here: this show that I am not naming felt like it was daytime drama. It didn’t seem as cheap as those have to be, but there was something, there was a patina that shouted daytime TV to me. It had this added patina of being contrived and somehow constrained, and it was also missing something.

It was missing the intangible something that makes you forget you’re watching a show and instead get into it.

Maybe if the show had been better I wouldn’t have been stopped and made to think all of this. As it was, more characters then swore at what felt like carefully negotiated intervals after that, and it was all too late. I had the sense every time from there to the end of the episode that when a character swore, what they really said was something like “Fuck that, look at me, I’m swearing, this isn’t daytime TV you know, this is great, be impressed”.

Children swear as they try to sound adult and you have the sense that they know the sound of the words, but not the meaning. That’s what I got here.

It’s not as if there can or should be a rule about anything, but I just wonder if I’d not have been so annoyingly knocked out of the story if the character had sworn at the start of the episode. I wonder if it would’ve helped us know her. And I’m quite sure that doing it this much later rather detached the swearing from the character and made it sound like an editorial decision, debated over by the writer and producer and director.

Obviously I can’t swear to that.

Seeking out strange new worlds, and liking them

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Funny. I used to explain that for me the one-hour television format was as vital as the three-minute pop song was to so many others. But then the so-many-others dwindled to the point where the phrase three-minute-pop-song became vaguely factual instead of totemic.

Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 “Born to Run” helped that happen, incidentally. Its 4’30” running time was one of the first songs to show US radio stations that tracks didn’t have to be three minutes or under to be hits.

(Mind you, US radio stations are weird. For decades they had a rule that you couldn’t play two songs by women in a row. No rule against men, play those all you like, but a woman’s song followed by another woman’s song, nope. Listeners don’t like it, listeners can’t cope, and listeners will tune to another station.

There is no way in which this is sane and no way in which it is good. Except that it is specifically the reason Sarah McLachlan created the Lilith Fair concerts in the 1990s. The concert albums that resulted remain some of my favourites.

US radio didn’t learn its lesson, incidentally. Rather than doing anything interesting, they fixed the problem of listeners switching stations by making every station identical, and by having the same firms own every station. Switch if you like, it’s the same music for you, the same bottom line for them.)

Anyway.

Music and television. If no one but me uses the three-minute phrase to describe anything today but boiling eggs, still there is a connection between music and TV. A connection and a parallel.

You know the story that Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” has just become a number 1 hit 37 years after it came out, and that this is down to the TV show “Stranger Things” playing it.

I see your 37 years and raise you 57.

In 1965, a pilot was made in the States about the voyages of a starship and in 2022, that pilot went to series. Fifty-seven years. Six decades. I know that as a species, we writers think decisions take a long time, but, come on.

As soon as you read the words “these are the voyages”, I think you know what this is about. If I mentioned that you need to go places boldly, that pretty much certainly nails it. And beyond adding “strange new worlds”, you just need to hear “starship Enterprise” to be totally certain you know the show.

But that pilot episode of “Star Trek” wasn’t the same show that got on the air, limped along, died, and became a pop culture behemoth with, what, a dozen feature films and as many different TV series. That pilot episode was canned and legend – honestly, there’s legend on this – is that it was because it was “too cerebral”. Viewers wouldn’t like it, viewers wouldn’t cope, viewers would change channel.

You can see that pilot episode easily enough and god help us if that’s what counted as cerebral in 1965. I was born in 1965 and I swear I could’ve grasped that pilot even then. I can imagine me all pink and hot, lying there in my first cot and gurgling “yes, yes, it’s all an illusion created by those aliens, we get it, and why don’t the women characters have anything to do?”

The show got a second pilot where it was turned into the series you know, love, and/or are at least aware of. Captain Pike was out, Captain Kirk was in.

And now, 57 years later, Pike is back in.

That 1965 pilot called “Star Trek” has now gone to series as “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” and it came to the UK this week as Paramount+ launched here. Three episodes of the show are available in the UK so far, I think ten have streamed in the States.

It’s not cerebral. But it is very good. I tried out the first episode and the next thing you know, I’ve seen all three. I tried out the first episode to see how it worked, to examine how a 2022 production would claim to be set ten years before the 1960s show.

That was what was fascinating to me, that’s why I was drawn in. There is all the production side, and I understand there are Star Trek fans who think the sets should have been made to look exactly like the 1960s show, but then there are always idiots. It’s a long time since I saw any of the original Star Trek, yet you watch this new show and it feels like they’ve got it right.

This is how the USS Enterprise looked in the 1960s, it just wasn’t done as well as it is now. These are the characters from the 1960s, they just weren’t done a fraction as well then as they are now.

That’s what changed this show for me, changed it from an intellectual — possibly even cerebral — curiosity, into a series I just want to watch because I enjoy it.

I have to put some effort into ignoring the 1960s-style haircut that Captain Pike has, but otherwise I’m already deep into the story. Except when Nurse Chapel is on and I cannot fail to marvel at how finally, finally, six decades finally, she is given something to do.

You can tell me about the differences in filming style, or production, or direction, or special effects, and I am interested, but it’s the writing that matters. These old characters are new because they are written so much better.

Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s unfair to say that a 2022 television drama is better than a 1960s one. We are all a product of our time, and my time is 2022, so I would prefer it.

Only, the argument has been made that Running Up That Hill is a 1980s song in form as well as simply fact. That it is a product of its time, that it was made using very specific synthesisers and styles of back then, and consequently it is dated. Bollocks to that. It was a favourite of mine then, it’s deeply powerful now, even though its writing literally has not changed one note in between.

Star Trek’s writing had to change radically for that old show to work sixty years later, but it did, and it has, and it does. Dammit, I’m going to have to stick with Paramount+ after the free trial ends, just to see what happens next.

Streaming services. Subscription television. It’s a strange old world.

The good, the bad, and who’s fault it is

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You know the way that music appears to slot into decades. A 1970s song is unmistakeable from a 1990s one, for instance. Clearly that cannot be true, there is no possible way that all musicians get together to decide on a style to last from January 1, 1990, to December 31, 2000. It’s our perspective, imposing this division by decades, it has to be.

And yet it’s also definitely true.

I’m minded of this because I think a lot about how no writing, from songs to drama, can be entirely divorced from when it was written. That would presumably be because no writer can be, either. But for me, it’s been an issue of degrees. All shows are of their time, but some seem it more than others, and some continue to stand up well despite their age. That’s the phrase, that they stand up well despite being old. But films and TV don’t actually age, they are frozen in the moment of creation and it’s we who age around them.

So when I wince at something I’m watching from the 1980s, perhaps it’s blameless and I’m the one who has aged.

The reason this goes around my mind a lot and the reason I listen to this little storm in my head is that I’m usually wondering about something I’m writing. I can’t see or appreciate what it is about it that’s later going to seem so obviously bound to today, but I also can’t see whether the piece is any good or not. I can’t see whether it’s me making it good or bad, or whether it’s leaning so much into its time that it’s nothing to do with me.

For instance, there is music I like perhaps less because of itself and more because of the time it connects me to. There are a couple of tracks by The Eagles that I think are musically quite remarkable and I feel their undertow, I feel they are somehow right and good. But then I listen to an Eagles album and think it’s rubbish. The songs I know from way back when are enormously better than the songs I don’t know from way back when, but which were written and made exactly then.

Possibly I just like the band’s hits. Yet I have wondered whether there isn’t any such thing as objectively good or bad, whether it’s the luck of what time and place the piece connects audiences to. Connect enough people and you’ve got a hit.

But then I rewatched Oliver’s Travels last week.

It’s a 1990s five-part TV drama series by Alan Plater and I strongly suspect it’s really a six-part drama but nobody could make it to the end. There is some poor direction, there are excellent actors in entirely the wrong parts for them, and if it doesn’t scream 1990s to me very loudly, it’s because I’m more deafened by how it yells Alan Plater.

Everything I relished about my friend’s writing is right there in Oliver’s Travels and not one pixel of it works. He told me about problems with the production and there isn’t an actor, a critic or even just a viewer who doesn’t instantaneously realise the piece was poorly cast. But it just isn’t written well and if it’s hard to see that – not to mention hard to say – then for once you can look beyond direction and casting and the whole production because Alan’s original Oliver’s Travels novel is rubbish too.

Sorry, Alan.

But it’s a good thing. It tells me to shut up about drama being bound to the time it is written in and it tells me that the key part is not time, it’s written. If it’s not on the page, it isn’t ever going to be on the screen.

And it’s writers who put it on the page.

We can make it to the Mexican border by nightfall

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So very long ago now, I used to write sometimes for an entertainment website – I’ve done this a lot and for more sites and magazines than I can reliably remember – and I was there when this one decided to launch TV episode guides. Even then, there were a fair few of these online, but they did tend to be either barebones TV Guide-style listings, or gushing fan tributes. This site wanted to become known for having the best episode guides, ones that were genuinely useful to someone looking up a detail, were totally accurate in that detail, and were also just a good read.

Really, they wanted readers to know the staff knew their stuff: the site wanted to be seen as an authority. So it had to be obvious that the guide wasn’t just rephrasing listing or PR copy, this all had to clearly be written by people who watched these episodes.

That’s a pretty ambitious, er, ambition. Not from the writing: the entire staff and all the freelancers like me had been writing about television drama for years on this and other publications. But it was dauntingly ambitious to start off on what was planned to become this enormous, comprehensive guide to just about everything.

I can’t remember all of the shows that something like five or six people were assigned first. But here’s how long ago this was: I got the then-new “Brothers and Sisters” season 1. I’ve just had to check and it apparently aired in 2006, which is a lot more recently than I’d remembered. I also had not remembered that there were 23 episodes in that first season.

Plus I can’t recall how long I got to watch them. I do remember a faintly feverish sense about it, I remember thinking I could just fit in one more episode if I did this or that, if so-and-so was as late as they usually are. I want to say I watched the season in a week, I am certain it was well under a month. Let’s call it ten days.

Ten days, one season, done, written about, filed, and I waited for what the next assignment would be.

It never came. Not on episode guides.

Instead, when my copy finally got read, I was told off. Taken to one side and told off.

At this distance, I can’t possibly remember the criticism, the specific words they used. But actually even right then, on the day, sitting in front of an unhappy editor, I believe my mind translated the words into “you wrote it too well”.

Because no one else watched any of their assigned shows.

Not one episode.

Everyone else had just rephrased and padded out listings and whatever they found online from the TV company’s PR people.

If you read mine, you knew I’d watched. If you read any of theirs, you knew they hadn’t. I’m not claiming that I wrote well and they did not, but I did and they didn’t.

I was told that I had to cut my piece back, strip out as much as possible, and make it look like everybody else’s. I truly can’t remember and strongly suspect I didn’t say fuck that, but I know for certain that I didn’t do it. Just as I know for certain that the site never became known for any episode guides at all. Tellingly, to find out for you when this was and how many episodes there were in Brothers and Sisters, I looked up epguides.com, not this entertainment site.

God in heaven.

I’ve just checked on a whim and this site I’m not naming still exists, albeit in a radically different form. I couldn’t possibly resist: I’ve done a search on it for Brothers and Sisters season 1.

The site says it aired in 1998, which it didn’t. It lists this 2006 drama as drama, which is true, but also incorrectly says that it’s children’s TV.

I’m surprised to say that there is a guide, though it’s just 50 words or so per episode. I hope it’s not based on my writing: it reads like a short, flat PR/TV Guide listing. I suspect the actual listings whenever this show airs are automatically pulled from the guide: the format has that kind of feel to it.

Anyway.

The argument for cutting mine down to match everyone else’s was that the site had to look consistent. Fine, I definitely thought and I hope I said, be consistent by having them do their assignment, watch the bloody shows and write better.

To my mind, the argument against cutting down to match everyone else’s was what’s the point? For the sake of a consistent look, they were throwing away all of this ambition, every single bit of their aim for the entire project.

I didn’t know they were also throwing away accuracy and I’m quite shaken by that. Partly from how you’ve just got to get facts right, but also because the first transmission date of a TV drama is not exactly a grey area.

Here’s the thing, though. I do understand that desire for consistency. And have even shared it.

I used to believe that there was a need for this on the other end of this TV episode guide issue, that there was a need for it in actual TV episodes too. I love television drama series and for all the myriad issues and possibilities in them, one thing seems a bit obviously true.

They’re series.

You hope for some great progression between episode 1 and episode 23, but episode 23 has to be the same show that episode 1 was. You can’t have episode 1 be serious, bone-crunching drama and episode 23 be a musical. Well, you can, and there are shows that pull off incredible ranges of episodes.

Only Doctor Who really manages that, though. Imagine if Line of Duty was piercing contemporary drama one week and stilted historical renactment the next. Or more possibly, imagine if one week Line of Duty felt authentic and in the next it didn’t.

There has to be a consistency and I remember adding that criticism to the very many others I had about ITV’s police soap, The Bill. Whenever JC Wilsher would write an episode, the characters sounded and felt and seemed like real police. When other people wrote episodes, not so much.

I felt this was wrong and that the series was doing a bad job.

But.

I was wrong.

And this is why I wanted to talk to you about this today, why it’s on my mind and –– I can’t say I expected this –– why an argument on an entertainment site from prehistory came back into my mind for the first time in decades.

Last night, I watched Look to the Lady, the first story in the BBC’s 1989/1990 dramatisation of Margery Allingham’s Campion novels. Some time last week I’d seen a later story in the short run and enjoyed it enough to want to watch more.

The story later in the run was fine. Look to the Lady was excellent. Much funnier, every character much more witty and just alive, and plot-heavy exposition conveyed with a twinkle in the eye. Loved it.

And knew I would.

Because this first story was dramatised from Allingham’s book by Alan Plater. Knowing he’d written it, my wife Angela asked beforehand whether it was going to be wittier than the last one. Because, she pointed out, whenever he wrote Lewis episodes, Inspector Lewis and didn’t-he-used-to-be-good Sergeant Hathaway were always smarter, faster, better than in other episodes.

It’s also true that the episode included this line about making it to the Mexican border that Alan seemed to enjoy fitting in to every show he could.

But if that was an unmistakeable signpost that he’d written the episode, it was never the case that he went so far as to make a show unrecognisable. It was never the case that Lewis and Hathaway were different characters in Plater’s episodes compared to other ones. It was just that you were more interested in them when he was the writer.

This is a case where I suspect I could have argued for more consistency right up until very recently, ie last night. But if my head sees the need for a series to be a series, my heart knows I’m wrong and it’s known that for a lot longer than 12 hours.

You want any series to be uniformly excellent, but it isn’t going to happen. Some episodes will be better than others, visibly and markedly so, but it is not the series getting it wrong for allowing that difference. It’s the series being damn lucky to have a great episode.

Los Angeles Tribute

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My first book was about the television drama “The Beiderbecke Affair” and it was for the British Film Institute. It was in their range of TV Classics and naturally, when you’ve done one, the only thing more likely than the publisher asking if you’d like to do another, is you asking the publisher if you can.

Even more than Beiderbecke, I wanted to write about “Lou Grant”. It didn’t fly and it didn’t fly for a dozen reasons from how the range almost never did US shows, to how the range wasn’t making money. But to make a pitch, I had to do a little bit of research.

That’s chiefly because if you are a publisher and you go to check whether there’s already a book on the proposed subject, you very quickly find that there is. My job was not only to convince the BFI that the topic was of value and that the chance of anyone buying a copy was good, but also that there was a reason for anyone else to do another book about this show.

To my mind, that was damn easy. This 1990s book about the making of “Lou Grant” is really an academic treatise. It sets out to explore whether the show and its “Los Angeles Tribune” newspaper setting was an accurate representation of real journalism at the time. The answer is: more than most. I’ve just saved you reading the book, although I’m denying you some fantastic access the writer had to key people involved.

As part of my own little initial stab at research, though, I created a few Google alerts. Any time something came up about “Lou Grant”, it would be added to the newsreader app I use constantly on my iPhone.

I think I originally created some alerts specifically for certain writers, but I would’ve abandoned that quite quickly. One of my favourite writers on the show is April Smith and if I remember getting alerts about her new novels, I know I got more news stories that contained lines like this: “In April, Smith said…”.

Forget setting an alert for Michelle Gallery. For a brief time I knew more about the opening hours of US art auction houses than is sensible.

But if I dropped those off after the book project failed to go, I somehow left the “Lou Grant” alert in place.

Consequently, over the years since, I have been alerted to the odd thing that some of the writers are doing now, and sometimes various television executives. There’s an excellent series of interviews with Grant Tinker about the show, for instance, and I’d not have found it otherwise.

Mostly I hear about cast, though. It’s through a Google alert that I got to watch Linda Kelsey performing a drama reading somewhere. Apparently it’s through a lack of Google alert that I can’t find that again now I want to show you. Bugger.

But if I found that a couple of years ago and if the Tinker interview is further back than that, there was one thing I could regularly count on my “Lou Grant” Google alert to keep turning up.

Ed Asner.

It seemed like very other week, it cannot be more than every other month, but I would get an alert of a news story about him performing a one-man show on stage somewhere. Or going to perform somewhere. Or maybe campaigning, or doing voiceovers, or just being interviewed an awful lot about the sheer volume of work he had done and the seemingly even greater volume of work he was now doing.

So it was a more of a jolt than I would have imagined to find out this week that he’s just died.

Just died. That’s like yeah, yeah, he just had to go do that dying thing, he’ll back in a minute. And there is a bit of me that would entirely believe that.

When I think about “Lou Grant” it’s usually about the writing, which I loved so much then that it made me want to become a writer. And which I admire so much more now that I am one. But back in the day, watching this series in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was of course the whole I was enjoying. The writing, the acting, the directing, the production, all of it.

Now I look back at it, I’ve a new appreciation for the set design. But I most definitely have a greater appreciation for the acting. It is all so naturalistic that I forgot then and I can still forget now that it is acting at all.

Tell a lie, it isn’t all so naturalistic. Ed Asner is far from that in the first episode. He’s so far from it that you feel he’s in a different series to everyone else. But then for that first edition and perhaps a few after it, he was.

Never before –– and significantly, never since –– has a half-hour sitcom spawned a one-hour drama. But that is what happened. Ed Asner played grumpy Lou Grant for seven years on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then he played the more layered version of him on his own show for five.

So if Asner thinks he’s still in a comedy in episode one, you can understand it. Or you can now. Back then, I may not have consciously registered the different tone between him and the rest of the cast, but I felt it and wondered what was going on.

Oddly, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” never really played in the UK. Even more oddly, one of its sitcom spin-offs did: “Rhoda” was a hit here. So when this “Lou Grant” show started, I hadn’t the faintest idea that this character had any history.

I sound like I’m criticising Asner for how he performed in those early episodes and I suppose I am, but really I’m appreciating what a giant and unprecedented job he was in the middle of pulling off.

There’s a lot else to admire about the acting in the show, but that’s the element that sticks out at me. I thought that this and those constant alerts about new shows was the specific reason that I was so startled by Asner’s death even at age 91.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been thinking about this for days and the reason I’m jolted by his death is bigger than I thought. Any time anyone you’ve even heard of dies, of course you’re sad about it. When that someone is a direct connection back to your childhood, it’s of course more, even when that person has never heard of you.

But beyond that, there’s this. There are actors I like, actors I don’t. Certainly there are performances I relish and ones where I’m glad they didn’t do that to my script. I would not have said that there is any actor who has inspired me. I would not have said Ed Asner has. This show’s writers, certainly. I’m so single-minded-focused on writing that it’s writers or maybe certain producers I know enable certain writers who I credit.

So where I would have told you that I am a writer because of “Lou Grant”, I of course meant the show rather than the character.

Except.

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was beyond a hit in the US. It was such a success that – cutting a story at least in half – CBS gave an on-air commitment to a spin-off for the Lou Grant character. You could dream of such a deal now, but such was the popularity of the comedy that CBS bought 13 episodes of “Lou Grant” straight off.

It was called an on-air commitment, but it was really pay or play. If CBS had aired the first couple of episodes to disastrous ratings, I’m sure they’d have pulled it and just eaten the enormous cost. Whatever their thinking was, the drama that made me a writer got on air and had 13 episodes in which to shake out things like that naturalistic versus more comedic acting.

I owe a debt, then, to the writers of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a series I’ve barely seen and certainly hadn’t the slightest notion of back when I was starting to mount up this bill. Creator/writers Allan Burns and James L. Brooks became familiar names to me on screen through creating “Lou Grant”, along with Gene Reynolds. But CBS had such faith in writers that it had tried to fire Burns and Brooks when they were developing the Mary Tyler Moore series and it was only Grant Tinker’s intervention that prevented them being out on their ears.

Which means score one to Grant Tinker, but this also tells me that really CBS gave an on-air commitment to Ed Asner.

So a show that meant this much to me exists because of an actor’s performance in a series I didn’t know.

I struggle to bring myself to say that therefore I am a writer because of Ed Asner, but it isn’t half looking like that. I thought it was unusual enough to be able to pin one’s career down to a single moment like a TV show, but to pin it to a performance I hadn’t seen, that’s just eye-widening.

Time series

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Tell me you do this too, look serious and say it isn’t just me. I measure the passage of time by TV series. I don’t mean to say that you and I should meet for a coffee at a quarter past “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or on July “24”.

I mean Buffy lasted for seven years. Thriller “24” ran for eight years in its original run. The remake of “Hawaii Five-O” has just ended after a decade. It’s not even as if I followed these shows –– I like Buffy and 24 a lot but didn’t stick with either, I didn’t like Hawaii but the remade theme was fantastic –– yet I am conscious that they came and they went. I talked about “Hawaii Five-O” in my 2005-2010 podcast UK DVD Review and since then, I’ve talked more and they made 240 episodes.

Then “Doctor Who” is heading very close to its 60th anniversary and I remember vividly running across Birmingham because I’d booked the wrong cinema to see its 50th special. Realising that there were two Odeon cinemas and I was not in the most right one, feeling the skin on my lungs as I ran across the city, that was ten minutes ago, not most of a decade.

And speaking of most of a decade, the reason I am thinking of all this yet again now is that “Leverage” ended in 2012 after five years. It’s back today, after what WolframAlpha.com tells me is 3,118 days. What in the world have I done in the last 8 years, 6 months and 14 days? Well, I’ve watched “Leverage” again, I can tell you that.

Otherwise, television drama comes and goes, time ticks on. I think of the immense effort that goes into creating a series and keeping it going for years, and then I think about how quickly that is gone. One moment “Leverage” is a series on US television, the next it was a series on US television.

And now it’s again a series on US television, albeit now called “Leverage: Redemption”. I don’t know when I’ll get to see it here in the UK, but I do know that however successful it is, however many years it runs, it is going to be over astonishingly fast, before I get around to doing anything.

Now we’ve moved from broadcast television to streaming, I don’t get the same thing of seeing a pilot episode one day and hearing the series finale is on ten minutes later. But I do get the discovery that while I was looking away, entire series have come and gone. The other week I came across the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship”, for instance. I’d not heard one syllable about this show but it turns out to have run very successfully for five years.

Five years of work and I missed it. But can now watch it anyway, which is what I’m doing while I wait for “Leverage: Redemption” to come to the UK.

We get so little time. I think people who funnel that time into television drama pull off a gigantic feat and I think they make something that lives and lasts beyond its time. In this case, so much so that demand brings it back for another go.

I think you and I should make some television. Waddya say?

Unequal pay for writers

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I was once asked to write something overnight, someone had let somebody down, something had changed, I don’t remember. But I do remember being asked to name my price and I doubled what this company usually paid me.

That’s very nice and I felt very good for about a pixel of a second because while they said yes, they said it with such obvious relief that it was clear they’d have gone far, far higher. For the sake of any claim I make of being a professional writer, I need to tell you that I then billed for that emergency rate for every single project I did for them.

Here’s the thing, though. The writer in me can go into paralysed circles over what I should be paid. The human being in me can go into a rage when, for instance, women writers are being paid less than men.

There’s no but in that one, incidentally and obviously. Women, men, equal pay, not one but, not one question, not one ever.

But.

That’s about minimums. And I’ve been in conversations this week where I think there was a belief that it should apply to maximums, too. There was definitely a moment where an idea of capping writers’ pay so no one could get more than some amount came up and wasn’t shot down instantly. These were writers suggesting this and there were circumstances, it didn’t come out of nowhere, but I said to them and I’ll say to you, no.

No caps. Every other bugger wants to limit our pay, we can’t enable them to do it.

There’s something British about this. I’ve been thinking about it all week and it reminds me of how in the UK, you don’t tend to haggle. The price is the price, you pay it or you don’t, it’s not that common to negotiate. I’m the same, I tried it once over a fridge or something and got nowhere.

Anyway. I think the logic was that if you are writing a one-hour drama for primetime television then it’s the same job for everyone. Takes the same time, is physically the same amount of words and pages, of course it should earn the same money.

I’m too polite to say this aloud myself, so please take the rudest word you can think of and prefix it with the phrase fucking bollocks.

Men and women, yes, of course, you must not, you cannot be paid more or less just because of which genitals you happen to have. Age, too, I’d definitely agree that a writer’s age is no more an important factor in fee negotiations than their shoe size.

I hesitate over experience, a bit. There is an increased rate for writers when they are experienced and there are good reasons for it, good and practical reasons, but I’ve also known writers who’ve written for years and just aren’t all that great at it. Still, experience, if I don’t back that as vehemently as I do the men/women equal pay issue, I’m not against experienced writers being paid more.

Where I will stand and if necessary fall is over this presumption that writing a one-hour drama is the same regardless of who you are.

Let’s say that you are not a writer, you’re a producer and you are now producing a series. You commission me to write one episode and you commission Phoebe Waller-Bridge to write another. There are immediately, instantly two very clear things you and I know both about these two episodes.

First, with deep and miserable regret, we both know that her episode is going to be better than mine. She’s a better writer than I will ever be, although I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try.

Second, you also know that she’ll be paid more than I will.

Of course she will be and of course she should be. She’s better than I am. I can’t comprehend an argument where I should be paid the same as her. She’s better, her script will be better, the show will be better, it is worth it to you as a series producer to pay more for her work.

That’s where people get this wrong, I think, and it’s where writers get it wrong, I’m afraid. We talk a lot about how important we are to drama because, well, there ain’t any drama without writers. But at the same time we deeply undervalue ourselves and where minimum rates are fair, maximums are not. It is worth a show paying more for certain writers, just as on a pretty infinitely smaller scale, it was worth it to that company to pay me more when they needed something written overnight.

Writers do feel undervalued and we are, certainly. There are actors who claim to have invented your characters, for instance. Even good actors are more likely to thank a director than a writer, although actually I get that: by the time the cast is on board, writers can be gone to the next project. Of course you’re going to bond more with the people you actually work with.

I just think writers undervalue themselves too. And in making a case for fees that assumes all writers are the same, are of the same talent and worth, is not standing up for our rights. It’s more like being colonised.

I think this is the killer argument and apparently I’m wrong as writers I talked with this week were not even injured by it. Still, it’s this and it convinces me at least: if you don’t pay a great writer more, some other show will and you’ll lose her.

Stupid count

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For six weeks now, I’ve been counting the days until today when I could say to you that I’ve read 2,000 scripts –– and I’ve blown it. I’m not sure why I was proud enough of this trivial fact that I wanted to boast at you about, but seemingly I did and seemingly I was going to preen for some reason. Instead, on slightly closer examination, I have to tell you that I’ve miscounted and today’s script was only the 1,899th.

Yes, I have just filed my tax return. No, I’m not now terrified at all.

Look, I’ve read a lot more than 2,000 scripts in my life. I love reading them, I always have, it’s just that on December 23, 2017, I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site which suggested reading a script every day. I can see me now, at this keyboard, thinking yep, good idea, I’ll do that. Since then I’ve read at least one script every single day and after the first year of it I wrote about the ten lessons I felt I’d learned from what I believed was 620 but who knows now, could’ve been 12.

I keep a list of what I’ve read and after the first while, also a link to where I read it if it’s online. It’s from examining that list that I discovered the miscount, but I was examining the list in order to hopefully be useful and I can still do a bit of that. I can recommend scripts and moreover, I can recommend sources for scripts. Let me do two sources and two specific scripts from those sources.

So while I see no reason you should ever trust me again about numbers, I believe that of my 1,899 in-a-row script reading, 318 were from my favourite site, TVwriting. I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t many, many more because that is my go-to site when I just want something good to read.

Another 105 were from the BBC Writersroom script library. I can’t say I’ve cleaned the BBC out since if I disliked a script to a show’s first episode, I skipped the rest. But still, I open that library page and it’s sometimes hard to find something I haven’t read. Certainly I’ve vacuumed up the entire radio drama, radio comedy and television comedy scripts.

I will press on, though, even beyond 2,000 when I finally get there in at most another 100 days. And let me offer this as another lesson from reading scripts: I may have read some stinkers, but there amazing pieces of writing just waiting for us all online.

The internet’s faults are legion, but there are gems, too. Including these two. It is completely unfair to pick out two scripts but no one said writing has to be fair, or at least nobody any good.

If you fancy reading a film screenplay, relish Man Up by Tess Morris, which I read on the BBC Writersroom on both January 5, 2018 and August 28, 2019.

Or if, like me, you’re more of a television drama nut, go for the pilot episode of Veronica Mars, by Rob Thomas, which I read on TVwriting on May 31, 2018.

I suppose you can call this educational reading and when I started this lark there was certainly an aim of improving my own scriptwriting. No question, it worked. But also no question, I read scripts for immense pleasure and if you don’t already do that too, I hope you will.

Just don’t bother counting them, it’s too difficult.

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.

#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?