writer

High yearnings

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I need to write a character who is yearning for something and I don’t seem able to do it. I also need him to be stupid but that’s easier, I’ve got form on that, not to mention a mirror.

Possibly I’m a bit fuzzy because right now, I mean exactly as I type this to you, I’m rather hoping that my COVID self test is going to turn out okay. I’m quite keen that it does, of course, a little anxious since I just was in a school talking with 150 people and am now feeling a bit rough, but still, that doesn’t feel like yearning. I’d appreciate your sticking with me for the next 15 minutes, however. Let’s talk so I don’t keep watching the clock.

The other night, I rewatched the first episode of “Hearts and Bones” by Stewart Harcourt. It’s so long since it aired back in, I think, 2000, that it practically counts as a first watch. But if I remembered very little of it from back when I must’ve reviewed the preview tapes for BBC Ceefax, what I knew in my, well, heart and my bones, was that it is achingly full of yearning. Some deeply hidden, some overt, all painful and all real. I need exactly that for this thing I’m trying to write.

You keep being told that characters in drama must want something or it isn’t drama, and I would go off on one there about how I understand this is a very Western view of dramatic form and there are others. Mind you, I don’t know the others. Shorter conversation than I expected.

If Western is all you can write, and now I suddenly see you wearing a cowboy hat which you are frankly pulling off better than I could, then I know that it doesn’t really matter what the character wants. They just must want it and if they get it immediately, the story is probably over. There’s a bit of me that wants to think bollocks, you just have to find a better story for immediately afterwards, but the principle isn’t wrong. Want something, blocked by something else, there’s at least the start of a story and, most importantly, the start of a character.

“Hearts and Bones” leads off with one character, Emma, longing, yearning, for another, a man named Rich, who happens to be her boyfriend’s brother. Dervla Kirwan plays Emma and I’m not sure she’s ever been better because Harcourt gives her moments of silence where the depth of feeling she portrays will squeeze your chest. I wish I could read the script.

Maybe it helps that she wants something specific, someone specific, but really she doesn’t. I mean, she does, but as well as the pull of attraction to this man, there’s the push of wanting, needing to get away from her life being the way it is. So it’s a specific, definable desire that actually embodies a vague, indefinable need.

I’ve realised that I don’t fully care whether my character gets whatever this nebulous thing is he wants. I’m not being coy or secretive about what he needs, I am really just struggling to vocalise it. Odd how it can be so clear in my head and yet what’s clear is that this overriding desire is something impossible to grab hold off and define.

Perhaps that’s the difference between fancying a particular man or woman and needing something impossible to define, to imagine, maybe even impossible to get. If all that happened in “Hearts and Bones” was that Emma fancies Rich, it might be soap, it wouldn’t be drama.

Okay. I see what you’ve done here. You’ve realised that I am yearning to write yearning. Smartarse.

If nothing else is clear, though, my COVID test is. Thanks for holding my hand.

I drove by my childhood last night

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Didn’t mean to. I did have to mark an occasion of sorts yesterday, but that was for later. Mid-evening I was driving to a familiar place through a less familiar route and at unfamiliar time.

Also, there were quite a lot of roadworks, including one set of temporary traffic lights that caught me outside what is now a Subway, but was once a bank. Through dusk and red lights, I could just see me going to that bank as a boy. It wasn’t to do any banking, you’re not looking at any kind of fiscally responsible man then or now, but instead it was part of the very best and certainly the most elaborate school trip I got to go on.

No, not part. Whole. That was the entire thing, a geography trip to this bank. It was a trip that in round figures was a stroll, easily contained within a single lesson. But last night, I could again see why we were marched off to it.

For down very low on the bank’s wall, where thirty of us once had to take turns crouching down to see, and where last night I had to sit up a bit to see over a bollard, there is a crow’s foot mark. It’s an Ordnance Survey marker, and it’s to do with establishing a base line in order to measure the height of hills and buildings.

Before I could remember what height I would’ve been back then, traffic moved on now and – perhaps not surprisingly – I was then driving by my old school. We didn’t get on, my school and I, but there is something about it still being there that is practically haunting.

As there was with this. The reason for the new route was that I was required to pick up a fish and chip supper. The chip shop I was directed to turns out to be very proud of the fact that it opened the year I was born. The year is on signs and everything.

So for every minute I have lived, for every thing I have done and thought and said, this chip shop has been a living business, a going concern, and for a moment it felt like it had been expecting me for all these years.

That’s probably not why a woman working there said “Sorry for the wait”.

Much later last night, I marked this occasion that I needed to mark and if I did it without looking back quite as far as school afternoons, still it was a whole bunch of looking back. I did this thing by watching Alan Plater’s “Doggin’ Around”. You can catch that on YouTube if you look in the right corners but – get me – my copy is from the BBC’s own archives. Which doesn’t sound relevant, does sound suspicious, but turned out to be poke-in-the-eye relevant for literally every second of the film.

For the BBC archive’s viewing copies of shows from the 1990s are effectively ROTs, Recordings of Transmissions. You don’t just get the show itself, you get the continuity announcements either end because BBC just recorded the whole output and later chopped it up into the shows. So it’s like you’re back watching on the night.

Except BBC archive viewing copies also have a timecode burnt in. I’m used to that from preview tapes, but this was not a clock showing the running time, it was a clock and a calendar showing exactly when “Doggin’ Around” aired. Precisely.

It was on BBC1 starting at 22:06:30 and on, it says here and throughout the film, the date 16-10-94. Ended 23:36:17.

By chance, I watched it at pretty close to those same times now, 27 years, 4 months and 26 days later. I watched it now on an iPad in my bath and simultaneously, it felt, in 1994 on a Mac in my rented London flat where I appeared to live on pizza bread, waffles and sweetcorn.

At about 23:36:18 on 16-10-94, I know I phoned Alan Plater to say how much I had enjoyed it. Three decades later on 10-3-22, I know I wanted to phone you to say the same thing.

But.

I’m also really not ready to look back in quite so much detail. It seems that the past can be a more lovely place to visit than I’d have thought, but, god, I don’t want to live there.

With or without a timecode.

So let’s you and I consider this as occasions marked and moved on from. It’s time to do something new.

Key on a keyboard

116keys

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Tomorrow is the second anniversary of 58keys, a YouTube series I do for writers like me who use and write on Macs, iPhones and iPads. If you don’t happen to write on those, 58keys is of no earthly use to you. But still, I want to share a general writing lesson I think I’ve learned from doing it.

And that’s just this: you can change what normal is.

I first thought of a YouTube channel in 2012 and even shot a couple of minutes of footage. I’m going to let myself off a little here by explaining that all I really had was an idea for one gag. Didn’t know what a channel of mine could be about, didn’t know what I’d be interested in, didn’t and really still don’t know what anyone watching could be interested in.

Nonetheless, for seven years I did bugger-all.

And even in mid- to late-2019, I did bugger-little. Shot a title sequence. Figured out what I could do. Chose the name 58keys. Now I write it down, that seems more than I thought, but really it was all held back by me being me. Until January 2020 when, little knowing what could possibly be ahead of us all, I was determined to launch the channel before the end of the month.

Today I am making some little money from it, but if that’s not the reason I do it now, it definitely wasn’t the reason I launched it on January 29, 2020. The sole and specific and exclusive reason I launched it was sheer frustration with myself for not doing it, for constantly putting off a writing job I wanted to do. I can be very unhappy with me, but this time I was angry.

So I launched it. Just to shut me up.

Somehow I got 7 subscribers in the first week. I’m now on 2,400 or so. In that same week, the watch time, the total time anyone played any video of mine, was 584 minutes, which would amaze me just as much if it were this week. Except I record the statistics at the end of each Friday and last week the total for the preceding seven days was 218.2.

Hours.

So that’s 13,092 minutes of me watched last week. Since I’ve got all of my statistics plus a pocket calculator, hang on one sec.

God in heaven. Since I began, the total watch time is 6,514,500 minutes. Six million minutes of watching me, that’s insane. I have a sudden urge to comb my hair.

And still it’s not what I learned, it’s not what I want to talk to you about. Nor is the money: YouTube pays less than you think. I’m getting between £20 and £40 per month, but then I also separately got a lot of funding about 17 months in, so the real per-month figure is considerably higher. There are also book sales that have come from it, and various courses I run. Plus I’ve just been booked to make a lot of videos for other companies.

No, truly, what I learned is this thing about the new normal.

There have been no breaks in the two years, no gaps, just at least one video every week. I’ve done extra editions in short runs so the total is 117 videos in 104 weeks. And now I know that there will be a 118th next week, 119th the week after. It’s still the same amount of work, it’s still the same amount of effort, but the doubt is gone. I don’t doubt that I’ll do another video, because I no longer think about whether I should doubt, or at least not as much.

For better or worse, for as small as my channel is compared to others, for as little as it pays directly compared to the time it takes me, 58keys is now a normal part of my working life.

And since I’ve scripted at least 90 of those episodes, writing non-fiction YouTube scripts is also a normal part of my working life now. That’s been startling: I can see my scriptwriting is better than it was, which had been an aim but I hadn’t guessed how very much I would feel it would help me.

You can very easily argue that there are other things I could put the effort in to, but I don’t think you can argue that writing effort is not being made. Or that things are happening because of it.

Which all gives me encouragement just where I need some.

It encourages me because there are other things I have put off, there are other things that I want to write, other areas I want to write in, other failings that make me angry at myself on the hour and the half-hour. There are areas where I feel both that I am starting from scratch and that I should have started a long, long time ago.

Can’t do anything about what I haven’t done, but I can pull my bloody finger out and make these new areas be part of my normal working life.

Why I left Radio Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God, it’s a great book.

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

And that’s why I left.

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

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

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

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

The end.

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

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

Press Gang

Quote me no quotes

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One of the more irritating things about me –– I keep a list, it’s available on application –– is that I quote incessantly. It’s not as if I’m ever quoting something you’d know, either. That could even be good.

It’s also not as if I always realise it’s a quote. The line will have become part of me, part of my idiolect, but I didn’t think it up, not so much. Now I say that bit aloud, I realise I could’ve got away with just quoting. If you don’t know it’s a quote, you might get irritated by its repetition over the years, but you couldn’t know I stole the line. I would have got away with it, but for you pesky kid.

I wish you’d been pesky another week. Because the line I have been forcibly reminded is a quote, the line that made me want to confess my sins to you today, is really tough to set up clearly. Nonetheless, you’re here, I’m here, we’ve got my quote, let’s play our game.

Please imagine you and I have got to a party or somewhere and we are waiting to be let in. It has been known that when the door opens, I may gesture to you and tell the host that “I caught this one trying to escape.” That’s it. You may well struggle to imagine that it gets a laugh, but over the years, its hit rate is pretty good. It’s not as if I do it every day, that’s not what I’m saying, but it comes up and then it tends to come out of me practically involuntarily.

Okay.

I read a script every day, I suppose because I’m scriptwriter and I want to get better at it, but chiefly because I enjoy it and I see no reason to stop. Since I also appear to need to count things, I can tell you that last Tuesday’s script was the 491st I’ve read this year. Please take a look at page 37, scene 634 from that script:

EXT. CAMPBELL’S DRIVEWAY. EVENING.

…The Butler answers the door. Spike immediately drags Lynda through.

SPIKE: (To Butler) I caught this one trying to escape – dug a tunnel with a cocktail stick.

It’s Press Gang. Series 2, episode 6, “At Last a Dragon” by Steven Moffat. The script is dated March 1, 1989 – you can read it all right here – and I probably saw the episode around the time it aired, February 22, 1990. That’s 31 years, 9 months and 18 days ago. It’s 11,614 days back and I am still quoting what turns out to be half a line from what we’d now call a Young Adult series.

Give me some credit, it’s the better half of the line. But if you’re still imagining us standing at a door, please look at my face as I reach that line in the script and realise all of this.

I was a bit startled. It did also flash me back to interviewing Moffat on the Press Gang newsroom set. It flashed me back further to when I used to work in a large company and we had Christmas parties. I see myself and I don’t know, perhaps 20 other people, in the St John Swallow Hotel in Solihull, where I am the only person at the bar who is more interested in what’s on the TV set than in the bottles.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem it now, but back in the late 1980s, Press Gang simply looked better than anything else. Certainly better than anything else airing around that late afternoon children’s/teen slot. I’m at the bar, the TV is on, the sound is off, and I’m wondering what this movie is I’m watching.

I can’t pin down the date I was at that bar, I can’t guess what Press Gang episode was being shown then. But I can pin down that it was 1,659 weeks and 1 day since I saw “At Last a Dragon”.

And I can tell you that the script still stands up. I’m not overkeen on the cocktail stick line, that’s not going to take a place in my idiolect, but I could do with being able to write that well. Makes you wonder whether Steven Moffat went on to write anything else.

Left wanting

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I’m not sure of the road that I went down to get to what I want to talk to you about today. But I know it began with writer Ken Armstrong and a piece he wrote about writing and not writing. It’s his story and therefore it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s everyone’s, but to disregard everything else he said and just pull out a bit that burrowed into me, there was a bit about fair weather writing.

Rather than writing only when the muse strikes –– if I’ve ever had a muse, he or she has been on strike for a very long time –– or when you fancy it, writers write. I write every day and I suppose that takes effort but it’s as normal and ordinary as breathing or wanting chocolate. I write unthinkingly, which may account for the standard of it.

But I do write and if I really do fail to think about whether it’s an effort or not, I at least recognise enough to know that I should simply nod encouragingly when someone says they’ve always meant to write a book. Mind you, it’s fantastic when they then do write one. Love that, can’t get enough of that.

Only, somehow I went from thinking about all that to thinking about all this. You do rather have to want to write. You’ve met people who talk about being published and earning riches beyond the dreams of JK Rowling, but that also means you’ve probably met people who don’t want to write. If someone wants to skip to the end bit, and a pretty unlikely end bit, they don’t want to write.

Two or maybe three times now, I’ve worked with groups of writers and we either got an opportunity or, much better, we made one. And these writers complained. They’d got what they said they wanted, they just now preferred to complain about some invisible element of it instead of writing.

They wanted to write but they don’t want to write.

I think now that even though a group I’m thinking of from five or six years ago were all writers and actually did all write every day, or near enough, they still somehow retained a portion of this same thing where they were happier sticking around the wanting instead of the doing.

And I also think now that I’m sounding as if I feel superior. I admit in that one group, I was irritated and said if they didn’t want this opportunity they’d been given, I’d take it. Next thing I knew, they’d gone ahead and done it –– without me. Not going to lie, that stung.

Yet if I should’ve waited a bit more with that group and probably said a bit less, I painfully admit that I did feel superior in that first moment. I tend to want to get on with things, many other people don’t, not so much.

Except.

I’m obviously nowhere close to superior anyway, but in particular I think this is a case of disliking in others what you dislike in yourself. I’ve wanted to write television since I saw “Lou Grant” in the 1970s. I can point to this last year or 18 months where my scriptwriting has been getting me TV meetings, I can point to how there’s an extraordinarily important –– to me –– radio play progressing pixel by pixel toward commission.

But it does all feel a bit late and I do feel as if just wanted it for such a long time. I should listen to myself and get on with it.

You know I want to.

Remember, remember, words can punch

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I am occasionally quite critical of my old school and that’s completely unfair. For one thing, it is entirely because of its teaching that I remember, remember the 5th of November and if that is less of a political education than it could have been, sometimes it can be all the politics I can take.

Then, of course, I can count the number of times I’ve needed to know that September hath thirty days. I can count because I presume I lean on this fact at most annually, but I won’t count because then I’d have to think about how many years it’s been since I was a schoolboy.

Apparently someone I was at school with is now in charge of the place. I want to assume he’s made it better, I keep wondering instead if he’s actually always been stuck there in some kind of purgatory.

Anyway. Something that would surprise my teenage self about what became of me is that I once had a request on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. I presume my school taught us some poetry but not well enough to remember and certainly not enough to mean that with a combination of their teaching and whatever writing skill I have, that I can write any poetry at all.

I cannot, cannot write poetry and all of this is partly on my mind because tomorrow I’m running a workshop that is all about it. It occurs to me that you might well think now that I am keeping up the high standards of my school, but I promise you, no. I’ve got a poet helping me in the workshop. I say helping me, I’m going to throw the ball to her and then soak up every syllable she says.

I think a lot about syllables, I think even more about words, and it’s an enjoyable kind of thinking which it rather needs to be since I’ve yet to actually get anywhere with the thoughts. Especially not when the words and the syllables are poetry. I can do it with prose, if you give me some prose I can express why I do or don’t like it, and I can vocalise why I do or don’t like a script.

Not poetry.

I am incapable of assessing a poem, just physically unable to have any kind of coherent opinion. What I can have from poetry, though, is a slap to the face.

Last night I re-read “Sweet Sorrow”, a stage play by Alan Plater. A group of people are having their annual party celebrating the life of poet Philip Larkin when an unexpected guest comes to the door. It’s the late Philip Larkin. And the play reeks of being Alan’s tribute to his friend, but it’s also very simply – in every sense of that phrase – moving.

It features many of Larkin’s poems and you also realise in the last moments that the entire play really comes straight from one of them. Like the script says, I only know the famous one about what your parents do to you, but across two acts, I am shown very many more and shown so well that these could now be favourite poems of mine.

That’s not why I wanted to talk to you about this today.

No, the reason is that the play has a brief nod to another poet, Christina Rossetti. It features a few lines from her “When I am dead, my dearest” and, for me, specifically these:

And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

That’s it. That’s the poem I asked to be read on Poetry Please. I was at the live recording in the Birmingham Literature Festival and practically first met poet Jo Bell there because she was sitting next to me in the audience. I remember she knew to put a sympathetic, empathetic hand on my knee. I want to say she knew to hold my hand. Those two lines make me weep and I was sitting there, shaking.

Last night I was in my office, reading an old stage play by a friend I miss, and those lines are the ones that slap me.

I am actually crying right now, writing them to you.

This is what my school should have taught about poetry. I have a sense that they would’ve said, and surely my teenage self would have thought, that crying over a poem means you’re weak. Now I know that it means the words are strong.

And that’s what I really needed to learn. Not poetic structure, not the fact that Rossetti died 127 years ago, I’ll take all of that and know it’s interesting, but fuck explanations, the point is that words are so strong.

My favourite football team*

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*I have no favourite football team. I would struggle to name a football team. Not true: if invited, I would very quickly name a team something like “Overpaid”.

But next week I am spending a day in a school for the first time since before the pandemic, and the subject is non-fiction. At some point before lunch I am going to point out to approximately 30 pupils from something 5 schools, that they have never heard of me before. That they are unlikely to ever hear of me again.

Yet they also now know how to find out something about me.

The thing I will ask them to find out about me over lunch is what my favourite football team is. I can think of two ways for them to find out and this is one of them. The other is to ask me. I am so hoping that someone will just ask me.

Being invited into a school is a privilege that I take extremely seriously. It’s on my mind a lot and if I’m saying much of this in order to have something the pupils can find online with a little effort, I’m also saying it to you because I am an idiot.

There I will be, next Tuesday, telling writers that you can always ask anyone, anything. That it is supremely easy to just ask them. And here I was last Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, telling someone else that since they wanted a particular thing from someone, they should ask.

I hope it was last Tuesday because that’s a nice balance of Tuesdays and because yesterday comes between them. And yes.

Yesterday, I had to ask someone for something. And I found it very hard.

Fair broke my arms trying to type when the stakes were so unnaturally high. I say unnatural because whatever the reason it was all so charged for me, it isn’t for them.

Maybe that’s what I should really be telling people next week. Whoever you’re asking is far less concerned, far less bothered, far less interested in the fact you’re asking, than you think. For good or bad reasons, for whatever reason, your mountain is not theirs.

So, I know this again and again, ask.

There’s a producer I want to contact and I’ve only got a US postal address for his company. I’m wondering whether I should just write a letter.

And now, talking to you, I realise there is nothing to stop my doing it but me, no one to say I can’t but me.

Also, it occurs to me that with my handwriting, I should probably type.

Diddy Do It

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I am not trying to distract you or me from what’s going on in the UK and the relief that the Opposition party announced that they’d do the same crap as the government, just presumably crappier, though they were a little light on the details.

No, it’s actually vital that I talk with you about a failed project of mine. I urgently need to tell you about a radio project that went nowhere so long ago that I can’t remember. I want to say 1996, so I’m going to, but it could be earlier. Details are crucial, you see.

This is going to sound more than it was, but sometime around then I and a BBC Radio producer had a project we wanted Ken Dodd to do. It was a series, I think maybe five short episodes, that would’ve had Ken Dodd as a detective. A detective walking the mean streets of somewhere, Ken Dodd and his Diddymen, Ken Dodd with a revolver and a tickling stick.

It was a murder mystery comedy and if you remember Ken Dodd’s act and you have forgotten the title up above, you may enjoy being surprised that I called the show “Diddy Do It.”

I did write it, my writing was atrocious, but I can only guess that was why Ken Dodd turned us down. I never knew why, I’m not actually sure now that he even saw a script, but I do know when. Kind of. If it were 1996 when we did this, it was at least 1997 and maybe 1998 before he said no.

Dodd was famous for his comedy, of course, and also how his stage shows were brilliant, but would run so uncontrollably long that people would miss the last bus home. What was less known, because few needed to, was that he was also his own agent.

I want to say I was warned going in that this meant everything took a long time, but I could be guessing.

The one thing I can be certain of is what I called the first two episodes. You may not remember his act, you may pretend you’re too young to, but I am certain that no one else has ever done this.

Episode 1 was called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”. And episode 2 was also called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”.

Such a shame the episodes weren’t as good as their titles.

Lies ahead

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I’ve been having trouble with a script I’m writing. It is partly because I appear to be in it and while my cold writer’s head can see that’s necessary to tell this particular story, even I wouldn’t watch something about me.

But then there is also this. The script is about real people. I am a real person, I’m a real person who hasn’t had breakfast yet and is having difficulty remembering whether he’s shaved this fuzzy morning, but I don’t interest me. Beyond wondering why I’m writing my own dialogue, and then why I’m reading it back, I don’t concern me. Instead, it’s everyone else I’m worried about.

I have more research about the two other real people in the story than is even really feasible. Plus above all the facts and the documentation, they were my friends. No question, I’m armed and ready in that sense, but I’m a writer who’s also a journalist: I would give up an eye faster than I would make up a quote for a real person.

And now I’m going to have to make up entire speeches. Ouch, that’s revealing: I’m hiding in tenses and presumably because I am tense. The truth is that I already have made up entire speeches. I’ve written a two-page argument between me and one of these people. And that fight cuts into me, it hurts me, yet still I look at the page thinking he didn’t say that and nobody cares what I didn’t say back.

Except I had a dream the other night in which the late Alan Plater told me, in these precise words, “as long as it’s true, make it up”.

Then it’s like I planned what happened next. The reason I’m telling you this today, apart from how it’s pressing on my mind and I tell you everything, is that a play of Alan’s is to be re-staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London later this year. “Peggy for You” is about Alan’s first agent, Peggy Ramsay, and I read the script last night. Re-read: my copy of the published script turns out to be 21 years old.

It also turns out to be the true story of this eye-poppingly wild and wonderful woman, except it isn’t true at all. Except it is. It is an account of one day of her working life in the 1960s, completely made up, and therefore completely true.

I know because Alan’s introduction to the script says so.

“When I started writing the play, I heard her voice saying: ‘Just make sure it’s a pack of lies, dear.’ And it is. I did no research, but relied totally on a blend of memory, anecdote, myth and legend. The few elements that can be clearly identified could not possibly have happened on the day in question.”

Since Alan is one of the real people in my script, I think I should keep listening to him.