TV

Right now, wrong then

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I should have seen this one coming. Usually if someone changes my mind about something, they do it quickly and I can never see things the way I did a moment before. This time, this week, that did happen, but it was less a new idea, more a confirmation of what I now realise I’d been working towards.

Previously… I used to believe that a story idea belonged in the form you first thought of it. If you thought of a radio play idea, then trying to do it as a novel was contorting it. It was contrived, it was wrong. The idea, the story, and the form are all part of the same thing, I believed, and if you change any part, you are going against the grain of the whole. If you want a TV idea, go think of one, don’t distort a stage story.

The person who changed my mind this week didn’t listen to all of that and then conclude that I was talking bollocks. But she did disagree and she did point out why.

And I was left with nothing else to say but the truth: “Then I’m wrong, aren’t I?”

I don’t want to let go of the opinion entirely, except I do. Maybe I just want to hang on to how I think the medium is important.

This woman’s entirely persuasive examples were centred on dramatisations of books and how interesting it is to see the process of bringing something to a different form, of how it naturally brings out other aspects, how it gives other opportunities. The example I gave back to her was the same. Slow Horses is better on television than it is in the original books. Screenwriters Will Smith, Morwenna Banks and co haven’t lost any of the strengths of the novels, haven’t changed anything, but have made it richer somehow.

But then five years ago I had a chance to do a short stage version of a radio play that I’d been struggling with. Struggling so much that actually I only finished it last month. Central to the many problems was a certain point where I needed one character to encourage another, but they physically and literally cannot meet. I think my ultimate solution in the radio script is a bit of a fudge, but for stage, I just had one of them walk by the other and whisper.

Didn’t matter that it was physically impossible in terms of the plot. It was right. The stage format allowed me to let that happen and it was right.

Similarly, I have a new stage play that comes from a TV idea and theatre lets me do things television never could. That story must start simultaneously in two time periods and for TV, I’ve made one winter and one summer to give it a visual start to the difference, before you then separately piece together just how many years apart they are.

For theatre, I put my characters on a train and had a train guard announcing to one “arriving London, 1987”, and to the other “next stop, Hull, 2019.”

“Seems a long journey,” says one of my characters.

“Try doing it standing up,” says the guard.

A small warm exchange and a simple, direct telling the audience what’s going on, but also done in a way that gives you a flavour of what’s coming next. Using an aspect of theatre that is pure stagecraft, that would be out of place on radio, out of joint on television. Using the form the story is being told in.

Sometimes you can still be contorting and contriving as you move between forms. But now I think the medium is only part of the message.

Exorcise regime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I, Muppet

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There’s a new Muppets show launching on Disney+ and I don’t think it’s going to be very good. I’m sure you’re bothered what I think, but the thought set off a little squall in my head about criticising shows before you’ve even seen them. Quite clearly, this is completely and totally unfair.

Tough. There is so much television –– and so much is so very good –– that you can’t watch everything. I am judging Muppets Now before seeing it, I am criticising it, but ultimately I think what I’m really doing is triage.

You do this all the time. Someone could tell me very convincingly that, say, a given football game is the epitome of human drama and the best they’ll get out of me is a uh-huh. On the other hand, I’m obsessed with time so if your story mucks about with that, I’m in. At least for the start. I’ll at least watch the first episode, or really at least mean to watch the first episode.

This is something outside of a show’s control. You can do a time travel series that I walk away from and there is one single sports series I like. (Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. Remember its strap line was: “It’s about sports. The way Charlie’s Angels is about law enforcement.”)

Since a show can’t know what happens to be a trigger for me, or the reverse, and since there is such a volume of television to watch, it has to present something. There has to be a hook, really, something I can be told about the show that could make me want to watch. The whole reason Hollywood pays its stars millions is that it used to be having a star name means your film opens, it gets a great audience for its first weekend. If it’s rubbish, it dies immediately afterwards, but it opens on that person’s name.

I have never chosen to see a film or a show because of the actors in it. Nor the director. Except the poster line “From the brother of the director of Ghost” was enough to make me watch The Naked Gun 33 1/3. And for a long time I did make the annual pilgrimage to watch Woody Allen’s latest films, but that was back when we thought of him as a writer.

Here’s what Muppets Now has.

The Muppets.

I’ve seen the trailer, I’ve read the blurb, and it was the fact that it was the Muppets that got me to do that much. It has a history, I’ve liked it before, I could be in, I was in enough to watch the trailer. Here’s what the blurb and the trailer has, other than the Muppets.

It’s unscripted.

I’m not knocking improv. You say the word improv and I think first of Tina Fey, who is unquestionably a finer writer than I will ever be. If I hated improv and she said to give it another go, I’d tune in.

But “unscripted” is all I’m offered here. There is something boastful about it, there is something about how brilliant it is that there’s no script. I do see this a lot, as if the idea that there’s a script is somehow bad. I do see that somehow it plays into the notion that for some reason audiences want to think the actors made it all up.

I’m a writer, I love scripts, I would be biased here anyway, but I am more than biased against unscripted shows, I am wary. Because it’s an empty boast. It’s a trigger line that means nothing. Telling me a show is unscripted feels like telling me it’s in colour. It’s doubtlessly factual, but it is of no use to me whatsoever.

I’ve worked on plenty of live shows in theatre and radio, I’ve worked on a few unscripted ones, and it is fantastic. Utterly fantastic, by far the greatest rush and thrill I have ever had. But that’s when you work on it. When you’re making a live show, I don’t think there is anything that comes close to how it feels.

That’s nice for you.

I’m minded of Janet Street Porter’s whole pitch for why people would rush to watch Live TV. She said it’s live. I remember waiting for the second sentence, but that was it. Let’s be kind and assume that the TV interview cut away before she could say anything useful, but the impression I was left with was that she believed live equals compelling.

Live TV launched in 1995 and closed again in 1999. More than twenty years later, Muppets Now still believes that the fact it’s unscripted is enough to make us watch.

Tell me that it’s an unscripted show in which the Muppets do/try/are/will X and I’ll forget the unscripted word and may be interested enough to watch.

Spend an entire trailer telling me solely that it’s unscripted, and I’m bored already. But then I’m a muppet, aren’t I?

Change the rules

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If you want something and the other person, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to give it to you, change the rules. Don’t try to fix the system from the inside: pull the argument on to your turf. Stand where you are strongest and argue from there.

It’s taken me so long to see that this is necessary and that any system’s rules are designed to protect the system and fight change. And this week 76 writers demonstrated it.

Actually, it’s 76 women writers and not only would it be irrelevant that they’re women, I’m not entirely sure I’d have noticed they were as I read their names. There are some I’ve not heard of, there are some whose writing I don’t like and there are some who I aspire to be as good as. But it’s their writing I’m interested in and gender wouldn’t cross my mind.

Except that the 76 names are signatures on a letter that made news around the world this week. These writers are protesting against the fact that UK television drama series use startlingly, ridiculously few women. Or to put it another way, it’s always the same bleedin’ men who write these shows. Or put it a third way: it’s the same type of people who write most of them.

I want to see drama from everyone and about everything. Right now the system is boringly out of whack and if I’ll be happiest when drama better reflects our country’s brilliant and vibrant culture, we can start by hiring more women. And I can point you at 76 women writers.

There are more than 76: that’s how many publicly signed the letter but there are untold more who support it yet fear putting their current work at risk by signing. I readily get that: I think I might well have been one of them if I were one of the writers doing this.

So I understand the ones who can’t sign and of course I applaud those who did.

But read their letter.

It’s strong and forceful but it’s layered, it’s funny, it’s involving. This letter is not a placard demanding what we want and how we want it now, it is engaging in every sense. If there is no mistaking its point or the strength of its argument, it is equally clear that this is a conversation. Like the very best writing, this is not a transmission of arguments from the writers to television commissioners, the text speaks in such a way that the reader is as involved as the writers.

If you forget everything else about what it’s trying to achieve, this letter is an example of smart, classy, vivid writing.

You can’t forget what it’s trying to achieve though, specifically because it won’t let you.

I imagine that there must’ve been hundreds of meetings where women writers somehow didn’t quite get the commissions their writing warrants. I imagine thousands of emails where projects somehow didn’t get to where they should.

And so rather than continue working in that system, these 76 writers yanked the argument over to where they visibly and vividly rule: these writers wrote.

I can only hope that it helps but I tell you, I wish I’d written that letter.

Smash cut to main titles

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You could say that radio brought us pop songs. Theatre brought us the printed programme. Film brought us the trailer. But it’s really television that brought us the title sequence. Movies often have them but the true main titles belong to TV. They are the clarion call that draws you to the television set and if you’re already watching then they draw you in. They embody and they embue the tone and flavour and verve of the show that follows them.

Or they did. For some years we’ve seen the decline of the title sequence and television drama is the weaker for it. Compare The West Wing with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Both Aaron Sorkin series could have an utterly exquisite pre-titles scene but The West Wing would then smash cut to main titles and that soaring theme, those stirring images. It was strong and bold and confident and fantastic.

In comparison Studio 60 would smash cut to a title card: literally the show’s name and a moment’s motion the way a Ken Burns documentary zooms in closer on a photograph. As much as I admire the beauty of a well-made film trailer, it is the TV main title sequence that gladdens my heart.

So I love that one project I’m doing requires me to think up a title sequence. I have been failing at this for several hours now but along the way have the most brilliant time remembering and occasionally re-enacting famous sequences.

Part of the appeal is the memory: a sequence will run at the start of so many weeks that they get burned into us. It’s probably impossible, then to coldly and objectively analyse a sequence but bollocks to cold and objective. The best title sequences deserve more than cold objectivity, they earn more. And that’s how you’ve already got several in your mind.

Yep. So do I.

Sometimes the sequence is better than the show but also, for me, sometimes a sequence only means so much because the series did. This is a title sequence that breaks me: my age is split in half, I can feel the very start of my career being sparked anew, these are characters who stand beside me today.

They stick in your head to the extent that when I thought of quietly telling you what my project is, I really did then think: “I sure wish the Governor had let a few more people in on our secret.”

None of this is helping me think up a sequence for my project but I’ve had a lovely time talking with you. Thanks for the distraction.

Appy anniversary

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This week is the sixth anniversary of the original App Store: the iPhone app store that is now responsible for how I spend a significant portion of every working day. Before then, apps were known as applications and not really that well known at all, not per se. Your mother didn’t ask you what an application was. Mine has asked me what an app is.

Mind you, before then, phones were known for being phones. And for being hard to use. I remember trying to read the manual in a theatre: I had a small production on and guests were coming, I needed to have the phone on but muted. Never worked it out.

Now it’s preposterously easy to do with an iPhone but actually calls must be the least thing I use it for. Because I run my life through the apps on it. The iPhone came with apps – the Phone is an app, but there was also an email one, music, calendar – and there are ones from that set that I have used every day since 2007 when I got my first iPhone. Right this minute my phone’s front screen has 20 very, very well-worn apps of which 10 are Apple’s.

That’s more than I expected. Look at the other 10, though:

OmniFocus – my beloved To Do manager
Fantastical 2 – my newly beloved calendar
Pocket – for reading saved articles from the web
Drafts – for jotting down text and then deciding what to do with it, whether to send a text or save to Evernote
Evernote – speak of the devil
Reeder 2 – for reading a lot, I mean a lot, of news every day
Wordpress – for doing some twiddles with this site
HulloMail – a replacement for iPhone voicemail since I’m on 3 that doesn’t support this naturally
LocalScope – for finding restaurants, companies, ATMs, bookshops, anything nearby
1Password – all my passwords and logins at a tap
AwesomeClock – my bedside clock
Concise Oxford English Dictionary (with audio) – what the words mean and how to pronounce them

There probably hasn’t been an hour of daylight in six years that I haven’t used one or more of those.

But.

Six years.

It’s a long time.

I wanted to know what the first was.

The first app I ever bought.

If you want to do this, the quickest way is to open iTunes on your Mac or PC, go to the App Store and check Purchased. You can’t tell a date from that, unfortunately, but the apps are stored in order. If you have more patience and a steady hand, you can get approximately the right date by going through your Accounts section and slogging, slogging, slogging back through the listings there. Very slow, very long. And the date is the invoice date, not the download one. So it can be the same day, it can be the day after. But as near as you will ever be able to determine, that’s when you got each app. Including your first.

My first ever app was… actually, it was two, I bought two at the same time and can’t tell which was first. But the two were NYTimes – Breaking National & World News and Yulan Mahjong Solitaire. I bough them on 11 July 2008, so that’s six years ago today, and together they cost me £2.99. I’ve just checked and the New York Times one is free, Yulan Mahjong is now £1.19.

They’re both fine but neither lasted on my home screen and I know this for certain because of this. This is what my iPhone home screen has looked like for the last six years.

The music there is “Last Week” from Green Wing’s soundtrack by Trellis.

There is one advantage to slogging, slogging, slogging through your iTunes Store account: you get to find out when you bought everything.

So I can tell you that the first book I ever bought through Apple’s iBooks Store was a free copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The first one I paid for appears to be some psychology thing called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman. I bought those both on 28 May 2010 and have only read the Austen. The first paid-for iBook I bought and read – and loved, incidentally – is Mapping the Edge by Sarah Dunant, bought on 29 May 2010.

The first TV episode was the free pilot to Damages: never watched it. The first paid one was The Mighty Boosh’s The Nightmare of Milky Joe, which I’d stumbled across on TV and it silenced the room, we all got so engrossed. I bought that on 2 March 2008 and I must go watch it again.

Films came to the iTunes Store before TV but my first wasn’t until 7 June 2008 and The Paper Chase. It cost me £6.99 and I’ve not watched it. I’m feeling bad about all this now. But the second film, the first paid for and also watched, was Searching for Bobby Fischer, aka Innocent Moves aka the subject of this blog by Ken Armstrong.

And all this buying from the iTunes stores started with music. On 15 June 2004, I spent £3.16 buying In Between Days by The Cure, Always the Last to Know and Be My Downfall by Del Amitri, and Jokerman by Bob Dylan. The first album, two days later, was Greatest Radio Hits by Bruce Hornsby.

None of which has had the impact that the apps I’ve bought this way did, but all part of this peculiar sea change that saw me move away from CDs, move to phones that work, move to actually the life and the career that I have right now. I like telling you that my working life would not be recognisable to me if all this hadn’t happened but I don’t like wondering what I’d have ended up doing.