Writing

Critical analysis

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I got trolled a little bit this week and the only important point is to stress just how astoundingly tiny that little bit was. I mean, come on, I’m a middle-aged white man, I will never know from actual trolling. Not even when I’m English but just used that American construction, “never know from”.

This is entirely off the point, but there’s just something I like about that phrasing. Also the way Americans might say something “most every day.” Can’t figure out why that pleases me so. I do know, for instance, that I like the word “gotten” because there’s such rage about it in England over what’s seen as the bastardisation of the language — yet in truth the word is British English through and through. It’s just that America held on to it, kept using it, protected it, and somehow we in the UK forgot it ever existed.

Anyway.

I’m obviously thinking about this trolling since I’m here talking to you two days – no, wait, um, nope, can’t be sure: it’s either two or three days since it happened. Might be four: it’s been a long week.

I am perturbed that someone could use my personal email address, the one that I’ll give you if I haven’t already, yet which I never share publicly. But the actual insulting bit, no. Neither now when I am struggling to remember what he said nor in the very moment when I read it, at no point could I manage an entire shrug.

All that happened is that some fella decided to email me to say I am a terrible writer. Finally, I thought, someone who agrees with me.

Yet it was a shitty email in all sorts of senses and I didn’t keep it around to study, but I don’t think a team of linguistic experts would have been able to determine what precisely he didn’t like. I’m saying it was a man although I didn’t register the name, but you know it was a man.

He did specifically mention my blog, but that’s just screwy. This is my only blog, right here, and he definitely cannot have meant this because whether it’s written well or terribly, it’s not written to him, it’s written to you.

So I had a little bump in the road as I read it, trying to fathom what it was about. But if I cannot overstress how little this little bit of trolling was, I also cannot find the words to describe how briefly it was in front of me. I am a fast reader, it was a short email, I took it all in with one glance, registering that there was nothing useful there and blocking the sender before I could even finish thinking the word “tosser”.

Only…

This man decided to write to fill me in on my being a bad writer and it’s that act, that decision, that’s had me wondering. I’ve wondered before of course, whenever you hear of the foul things so many people get sent over social media, but this act of flinging out a quite petulant email put it all back in my head again.

There is not one single pixel of a chance that I would ever email a writer to say they are crap – note, not to say that I think they are, that I don’t happen to like their work, but that they actually are crap.

I wouldn’t do it because I’m pragmatic, I might need to work with them some day. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a professional writer and I know very well what you see on screen or read on paper goes through a hell of a journey to get there and we can never know what has happened on someone else’s journey. And I wouldn’t do it because, I hope, I’m a nice guy.

Yet even though I believe all of this to be true, in all practical honesty, these reasons may not be why I wouldn’t do it.

The real reason might be this: who has the time?

Commonwealth Games Bull 700

Oh, one to one, I get it now

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There’s too much in my head. It’s 23:21 on July 28, 2022, and I’m sitting on a security barricade in Birmingham city centre, waiting for my wife Angela to get here on the shuttle bus from Alexander Stadium. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that we were in lockdown and everyone was stuck at home all the time, but tonight I’m outside and easily 150 people have walked by me in the last few moments.

I say 150 people, but they had the energy of about a thousand. All of them coming from the stadium, all of them coming from the Commonwealth Games 2022 opening ceremony – and only a few coming from performing there as Angela did. Dressed in a Peaky Blinders costume, Angela walked behind the athletes from Oceania, and then spent the rest of the night dancing in the centre of the stadium.

It’s not as if this is the first crowd I’ve seen and I’ve even been on these same shuttle buses. But it was heightened because of the contrast to last Saturday when I was fairly near the stadium and very near this security barrier, yet in such a flatter situation.

Those few days before now, I was busy having a stabbing sense of how much I missed just sitting in a Birmingham bookshop, how I missed just reading a book, having a drink, and not having a deadline or a pressure to get anywhere. But the stab was so particularly sharp and tearing at me because I was feeling it while I was actually doing every single one of those things.

I felt it when I was directly experiencing every bit of every thing I was missing so painfully.

I think now that it was the directly bit that was a problem. Yes, I was directly experiencing it all, but it felt forcibly indirect. It felt like everything around me belonged to before the coronavirus, like I was remembering what it used to be rather than feeling what it was. Or maybe it was that it felt like there was a film over it all. Like I was seeing through a glass, dimly.

And yet here I am now, crowds of people walking around me, every one of them coming from the opening ceremony that I just watched on TV, everyone a stranger, and I do not feel the same stabbing separation from what is around me.

There’s definitely an issue that this is a crowd with one tired and exalted mood, and that’s the same mood I have.

It’s the same mood I’ve had for a week, too. Saturday may have been spent examining those moments where I was disconnected from what I was doing, from when I felt like I was kept from my own actions by an abstraction layer. But Sunday onwards was about examining a different series of moments over and over, examining something I truly was just a spectator at, and yet which I felt properly present for, properly part of, properly and rightly proud of.

On Sunday, I was at the first dress rehearsal for the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. Reality was helped through my being accompanied by an ocean of rain running into my eyes, into my skin, but it was all the deepest of pleasures and excitements and if I came close to being washed away, it didn’t matter.

Then on Tuesday, though, it was all the same again and all totally different because I was back for the last dress rehearsal. And as well as bright-hot sunshine, I was perhaps a twentieth of the way further around the stadium so everything was framed from a different angle.

It was all about watching, until it was all about feeling. I was looking for Angela, I was looking at this mesmerising spectacle. And at points on Tuesday I was also looking through binoculars.

Wait, it’s 23:34 on Friday and I’ve just had a notification that Angela is sharing her location with me. She’s three miles out but heading this way. I’m typing rather slowly tonight because I’m doing it on the glass of my iPhone but also because I keep hearing people talking about the Bull from the ceremony. It is most definitely a Bull with a capital letter. Someone is also saying they’re too young to know who Duran Duran is. I’m so old I’m wondering if it’s who Duran Duran are.

Two miles out.

And I’ve just chatted with a woman who is organising transport for athletes throughout the games – starting at 05:00 tomorrow. Hopefully she’ll still be buzzing.

And now one of the dancers. There was more separation with her, she was giving out the sense that I was audience while she was truly part of the show, yet I enjoyed seeing her pleasure, her satisfaction at a job done marvellously well.

Plus, this is a really good security barrier I’ve picked: people keep stopping to put on coats and arrange bags and talk with me.

23:42. Angela is 0.8 miles away. I’m off to bounce at her. Back in a sec.

00:33. We’re home and Angela is flat-out exhausted but I’m too wired to shut up. So I was saying, throw in the binoculars and also how I spent Friday evening watching the BBC coverage of the ceremony, and I have four vivid, visual memories of the same event from four different angles and in a range of weather from sunburn on the left to snorkelling on the right.

Plus I have what little snippets I’ve managed to get out of Angela over the weeks of her rehearsals. Plus I’m surprised how many people I know worked on the show, including its writer, Maeve Clarke.

And let this be a summary of both my town and her writing. I do not believe there is another city in the world that would puncture its own celebration of itself and its true glories by shining a light on the worst moments in its history. Birmingham did that tonight and Birmingham pulled it off: it made the night stronger, it made the city stronger.

It made the celebration bigger, I think. There was a sense of exhilarated hope for the future and I was moved every time I saw it and from every angle.

I suddenly remember moving to London for a job and being forgiven for coming from Birmingham. The man who forgave me came from Liverpool. Or possibly Manchester, I stopped listening to him mid-sentence. And I remember a woman mocking the Birmingham accent, oblivious to how she had an impenetrably coarse Cockney one and to why I was laughing at her.

So I’ve always been able to get angry when people dissed Birmingham, but I haven’t felt the city was part of my writing, was part of me as a writer. I’ve actually envied writers who have very clear and strong sense of location and of home in their work, and I’ve lamented lacking that myself.

But not now.

Now, I get it. It’s 27 years since the telephone number prefix for Birmingham was changed to 0121, a number that kept coming up in lyrics in the ceremony. Actually, I just checked and, startlingly, it’s 9966 days since that happened. And only now do I see the 66 and 99 quote marks around the numbers, only now do I see that “oh, one to one” that’s right there in my phone number. Birmingham truly does welcome everyone and it’s not in some en masse sense, it’s an individual welcoming, a specific recognition that you are special and that you are wanted here.

And only now do I also see that this constant urge I’ve always had to credit everyone else and downplay anything I do myself is straight-up, full-on Brummie. And I’m proud of that.

But I’m just more proud of Angela, of Maeve, and everyone who made this thing that was bigger than any one of them, any one of us.

Be a fraud

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I am reasonably sure that there hasn’t been a single day in my adult life when I haven’t written. Maybe it’s just a sketchy idea, maybe it’s this right here, writing to you, but it will have been something. Something where I thought by writing, by typing.

Also, frankly, by shrugging. I don’t have “Write Something” on my To Do list. If I didn’t do it, I’d now be a bit surprised, but hardly concerned. There isn’t a rule that writers have to write every day and I don’t imagine you’d think there was, except enough people do that it’s a little issue.

It came up at the National Writers’ Conference earlier this month, for instance. Don’t let me make it sound like the whole conference stopped to gasp, it was just one small moment in a large day — but consequently, it’s also come up in conversations since.

The idea that writers should write every day is the kind of thing that anyone who isn’t a writer would barely register being said. And if they did hear it, did register it and even if they did happen to believe it with a passion, it doesn’t affect them.

Yet there are enough writers who are troubled enough by this idea that it comes up in conferences. I think I’m already making too big a deal of it, so let me just offer that any kind of idea that makes writers feel guilty is bollocks.

All that matters is what lands on the page or the screen, and I don’t see that worrying about not having written yesterday is in any way a help to you writing today. It’s easily the opposite: if you build up this idea that you’re a fraud for not writing every day, I suspect it becomes harder to write any day.

Do whatever you need to get to the finishing line and if that is writing every day, fine. If it’s writing just when you can, well, I’m going to look you in the eye and suggest there’s probably a bit more you can do, but I won’t do that very firmly.

Because if your failing to write every day means you’re a fraud, then be a fraud. Be very a fraud. All that matters is what ends up on the page and the screen, whatever it takes, however long it takes, whether it’s a daily effort or not.

I happen to find it easy and normal and ordinary to write every day, and that’s nice for me. The real worry is whether you or I write anything that’s actually remotely good, and here I need to stop looking you in the eye.

Three increasingly specific rules of writing

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There are no rules in writing, but if you break them, you get a very annoyed reader. Now, I don’t actually mind annoying readers or audiences. Engendering any feeling, even annoyance, is an amazing thing. But just as I wouldn’t sit here trying to think what would be most likely to offend you, I can’t do annoying just for the sake of it.

At least, not deliberately.

When I am intentionally annoying, it should be for a purpose and hopefully you’ll come to think that purpose was worth it. For instance, it must be twenty years since I read Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War novels and just saying the title to you takes me back to being ferociously annoyed on a London tube train, reading what would then become some of my favourite books.

That’s where I was when I got to the bit where Guy takes that thing of Harriet’s. If you know the books, you know the thing. And if you don’t, I have an enormously recommended solution.

Anyway.

It turns out that there are three things that are guaranteed to make me wish I’d not started reading, and to stop me reading or watching or listening a minute longer. Your mileage may vary, but I propose that the three things that should be banned in writing forever are:

1) Endings where it’s all been a dream
2) Any story that uses multiple universes
3) The finale of Spooks season 1

Granted, that last one is a bit specific. Spooks was a superb BBC espionage thriller whose first run ended with an utterly compellingly fantastic final moment — that was destroyed in the opening seconds of series two.

To say that someone was trapped in a house with a bomb is to so far undersell everything that was happening in the first season finale, to so far undersell the blame and the fault and the tension, that the only reason I’m willing to not bend your ear for an hour about how great it is, is season two.

Where season one ends with that house blowing up, season two begins by revealing no, no, it was this other house that blew up, see? Everyone you’ve ever heard about in the show is fine. It’s okay. Calm down.

I did not even finish watching that second season opening episode.

But if it’s unfair to make that specific example be a rule alongside the dream endings and the multiverse, it’s also completely fair because all three are really the same.

Don’t cop out.

You can take us into tense and frightening areas, but you can’t cop out afterwards. I’m struggling to recall examples where I knew that pulling back at the end was imposed by someone, probably a broadcaster. There used to be a rule in US network television, for instance, that no character could quite aim a gun exactly at the screen, not quite, because that would frighten the poor public. This is about the same level of patronising.

Grief. In this moment, right now, I’ve flashed back to a meeting with some Top Gear producers, possibly solely Top Gear website producers, but I think it was the show. This was back when the BBC was under fire for faking the result of a vote to name a dog in Blue Peter or something. In its thorough way, you cannot count the number of meetings and rules the BBC put in place after that.

But during one of them – I can’t remember why I was even involved and it was certainly just as a spectator – the Top Gear people mentioned that show’s habit of staging races between its presenters. Three presenters, three cars, a race to do something, or to get somewhere, I don’t know.

My producer at the meeting got into an argument with them over the races. I remember this because I didn’t rate that producer and this was the sole time I agreed with him.

His position: everybody knows the races are faked. Their position: doesn’t matter.

They believed the races were compelling because they were races. His position was that if you know it isn’t real, you don’t give a toss, no matter how excitingly edited they are.

Things don’t have to be real, they just can’t be fake. And any cop out, any dream or multiverse or yeah-right-different-house-blowing-up is as bad as fake racing, for all the same reasons.

It comes from the same insulting belief that you can build up tension for the poor public and then take it away before actually doing what you were building to. I’ve seen where writers and producers are proud of how tense they’ve made something, to the point of congratulating themselves, somehow believing they were daring and brave, even though they had then destroyed everything they’d worked to create.

Here’s the clearest sentence I’ve ever written. You can do something or you can not do something, but you can’t do it and also not do it, you cannot have it both ways.

I’ve enjoyed many a moment of misdirection where we were at a different house than we thought — Slow Horses just did exactly that with a rather smaller moment and it was excellent — but for the big ending that’s meant to guarantee we come back next season, then saying it’s fine, they all lived, they woke up. No. Goodbye.

It’s a different house is an insult. It was all dream is another way of saying you just wasted the last 90 minutes watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although to be fair there is a clue in the title.

A story where it’s revealed there are multiple identical or very-nearly-identical universes is a story where the writer couldn’t cope keeping it in our one universe. Though to be fair, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would sometimes play with two universes and cause scarringly deep emotional consequences in both.

Bugger. DS9 pulled it off. Shakespeare wrote dreams.

But that ending of Spooks was still shit, so there.

I think we’re alone now

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Whatever you write, and even whether you do it with a partner or in a writers’ room, there are hours and hours when you are on your own with the keyboard or the pen. Nobody with you, nobody making you write either, and probably every other writer has a new book out, is promoting their new play, is doing all the talking and the socialising that lies the other side of thousands of hours of lonely work.

If you can’t do the time, you’re not a writer.

Only, even though there is no way around the solitude, even though you’d better enjoy it or else, there is a way around the solitude. Hello. As I write this, it’s early on Friday morning but I know you’re there, I know we’ll be talking, I am writing this to you.

But then also tomorrow I’m attending the National Writers’ Conference in Birmingham. (Booking has closed but you can read more about it here.) It’s the first time I won’t be working at the conference so it’s the first time I’m not thinking about the job, not thinking about the writing, just looking forward to seeing writers I know and admire and relish, and meeting writers I’ve not seen before. There’s also an actual programme of events at the conference and that’s the practical, sensible reason for going, but it’s the being with writers and specifically these writers that’s why you really go.

And two days ago, I was in my office alone, but I was also on a Zoom call with, I think, 100 or more members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. It was the Guild’s AGM so again there was an actual programme and the Guild is a trade union, not some writing group, so the order of business is serious. Plus we are in such hard times for writers in the UK and the Writers’ Guild is all that prevents us being screwed over, that the order of business is very serious.

So very serious that you can’t believe how funny and happy the AGM was. We are alone, but we’re alone together.

And as of the end of that meeting, I am one of the two Deputy Chairs of the Writers’ Guild. I take that so seriously, and I am just daunted enough, that you can’t believe how good it feels to stand there with this Guild and to try stepping up to that exceptional team.

It was as I sat down today to write to you that the “I think we’re alone now” song, written by Ritchie Cordell and for me permanently linked to my then age-appropriate crush on Tiffany, popped into my head. But it popped in here not because of the alone part, but because of the we. That song is about sex and I am suddenly blushing as I look at you, but it’s about two people and they are alone together.

Anyway.

Writing is peculiar in that the deeper you can push inside of yourself, the more you can connect to other people. Usually the idea is that you’re doing this to write something that reaches people, but really always it’s about you as well as it is about them and it’s so great, so essential that we have each other.

Only connect, eh?

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.

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.

The waking ally

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So lately I’ve been watching Doctor Who from the start and earlier this week I got to a 1964 episode called The Waking Ally. I’ve seen it now and I cannot figure out who the waking ally is. So very, very foolishly, I looked it up.

It’s days later and I’ve spent a ludicrous amount of time delving into Doctor Who trivia. And as a consequence, I’m experiencing what I can only describe as double-decker nostalgia. Two layers of nostalgia. I’m apparently nostalgic for a moment when I was nostalgic.

For in October 1964, around the time of this episode I’ve just watched, the cast and crew of Doctor Who had a party in the Bridge Lounge at BBC Television Centre. They were there to celebrate having made 50 episodes.

And thirty years later, I was there too.

It’s not as if I stood there, too scared to mingle, too young and timid to interrupt Verity Lambert talking with William Hartnell. But it felt like that’s what I was doing. Just for a few minutes, I sat on the side of a table in that room, quite possibly where they had sandwiches three decades before me, and I listened closely to nobody’s conversation, I heard nobody give a speech.

And now, today, there’s no Bridge Lounge.

It’s gone in the sense that this part of BBC Television Centre has been demolished, but scarily also in the sense that I couldn’t remember quite where it was. I used to walk by it every evening I worked there, every time I headed for the restaurants. But I have a 1950s architect’s sketch of the building and I’ve been staring at it, completely unable to identify the Bridge Lounge.

Brilliantly, however, Google Maps documented the building before it was demolished and I’ve just been using that to walk around this deeply beloved place. And despite not remembering where the Lounge was, not being able to pinpoint it on a map, “walking” through the building, I went straight there.

It even looked as if I met me coming back.

TVC in Google Maps has ghosts like that figure all over the place, but frustratingly, it isn’t complete. In this case, it stops just short of where I want to go now, where I went before. It takes me up to the bridge part and there’s a sign over the entry saying Bridge Lounge, but it won’t let me go further along that part or then left into the room itself.

But zooming along up to that point, racing faster as I realised that I was right about where to go, I could taste the air in that corridor.

I’m nostalgic for the atmosphere you can’t see, for a party I was thirty years too late for, and in a building that no longer exists.

I still don’t know who the waking ally is, but I’m grateful for the journey he or she has sent me on.

A word with you

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I’ve always known dialogue is revealing, it’s one of the reasons I love dialogue, which is out and out the reason why I’m a scriptwriter. The words one character uses to describe another, for instance, do hopefully do their job and give you a mental image of who they’re describing, but the very same words at the very same time also illuminate the first speaker.

For example, I could say right now that I think you’re clever. That’s a fair description of you, fine, but what it simultaneously tells you is that I’m observant.

The one word, “clever”, is not some special word, not some special code, it isn’t anything where you feel the line of dialogue is contrived or unnatural, it’s just a word to describe you — which happens to do this little bit of describing me, too.

What’s been brought home to me this week is that sometimes it only takes one word. One word can describe someone, it can convey a tone and atmosphere about a group of people, it can change your mind.

One word can be like a light switch.

There’s a Facebook group called “Old Pics of Brum”, and as it’s about my hometown of Birmingham, UK, I liked this group. Lately it’s been very active and I’ve been actually looking forward to the latest images, yet now I just skip any notifications like I haven’t got the heart.

Not since a friend, the writer Claire Bennett, mentioned that the group had removed one of her old pics of Brum for, ostensibly, not being an old pic of Brum even though it is in fact an old pic of Brum. You can see why they’d be confused. Maybe there’s more room for debate than I think, since I haven’t seen the image, since they’ve removed it.

Only, in talking about this, she also mentioned that separately she’d commented on some other image whose description talked about “ladies” and she had pointed out that they were women. She got told she was pedantic and I don’t know what happened next, but you know they didn’t change ladies to women.

And ladies is the word.

You do get many people saying “ladies and gentlemen” at the start of speeches but that’s practically become a meaningless series of syllables, an automatic utterance like the way “dulcet tones” is said by people who have no clue or interest what “dulcet” actually means. Or how so many such speeches have “and with no more ado” at the end, spoken by people who could not possibly tell you what “ado” is.

Frankly, I want some more ado. Give me lots of ado.

Outside of this kind of automatic sentence fragment, though, when someone says the word “ladies”, it is illuminating. Or to be fair, chiefly when it’s said by a man.

If a man comes out with the word ladies in a sentence, he’s at the very least telling me his approximate age. If he also decides to tell me that he knows how to handle the ladies, I know that he doesn’t and that he’s quite likely to be still living at home with his parents.

You just know, for instance, that the pathetic tossers who edit Wikipedia to remove biographies of women are men and that they are the kind of men who say “ladies” more than they ever say “women”.

The one word conveys a whole mindset to me, a mindset that believes women are another species instead of half of the same one as men. Whether it’s “ladies” in general, or one specific “lady”, the word is such a filter over someone’s description that I’m not sure I even register the rest of the words. I know I don’t think a man is describing a woman correctly. I do think he’s told me all I need to know about him.

“Ladies” is the turn in the conversation where you know you’re done. It’s a walk-away word.

I haven’t quit that Facebook group over the word. They might chuck me out if they read this. But I’ve walked away from it so far that I won’t even notice if they do.

Ringing the changes

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I don’t think people know how to use phones any more.

Quick story. It’s some time in the 1980s and I’m in a producer’s office, pitching him a factual idea for BBC Radio 4 that I’d called “555”. It was about the then little-known fact that every telephone number uttered in any American film or TV show began with the area code 555. Today you’d make a YouTube video about it and about how America’s Bell Telephone Co reserved that whole code for filmmakers, but back then I had a good case for also finding the UK equivalent, looking into the stories of what happens when shows use real phone numbers instead, and so on.

Back then, in that office, though, I am also there when the producer’s phone rings precisely as I first say “555”, and when he answers but there’s no one there. Back then, this kind of dead call was rare enough that he hung up the receiver and said that it was surely a sign that we should make this show.

We never did.

Anyway. Today, yes, I get three or four dead calls a day. I know that I can block them on my iPhone but only in such a way that I also block calls from people offering me work, so, you know, I put up with the dead calls. Incidentally, I’ve learned that if I pick up and do not say a word, a huge proportion of the time, they hang up. You can’t imagine me not talking. Thanks.

That aside, I know you just pictured me picking up my iPhone and putting it to my ear. Or you definitely pictured the 1980s producer picking up the phone receiver and holding it to his.

And that’s what I see changing. Maybe it’s just a greater awareness of my surroundings post-pandemic lockdowns, but now I seem to see a lot more people talking on their phones as I walk around outside – and none of them put those phones to their ears. It’s now always, always, that they hold the phones out in front of them and are using the speakerphone.

I’m not saying this is wrong, it’s just that it’s like the sudden majority don’t know there used to be this thing about holding it to your ear. Sometimes it’s like they don’t want to hold the phone that closely, it’s like they are staring at this device in fear of its witchcraft and/or post-Brexit roaming charges. Sometimes they’re tweeting while they talk and sometimes that leads them into a tree. Or sometimes they’re on video calls and I like video calls, I’m just a little less keen at staring up someone’s nose while we talk.

But it’s now so common to see phones used being this way that if you do see someone holding a phone up to their ear, either they are old or you are in a film.

I know mobile phones killed off a lot of cheap tricks in drama, like the ominous slow pan to the ringing hall telephone seconds after the hero has left on what we know is probably not a fatal errand but we’re supposed to think that this week it just could be. Or when characters are trying to call each other at the same time so the lines are engaged and that’s it, we’re on our own now.

I also know that mobiles have opened up new drama possibilities, like saying you’re in one place when you’re in another, or being tracked by which cellphone towers your call goes through, or Android phone users being able to call for help while iPhone ones look for a charger.

But I didn’t know how the use of phones has so visually changed.

Or maybe I just don’t know why so many people now believe I must hear both sides of their conversation. Look, you were on a break, okay?