Writing

Born in the 1900s

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I just heard this expression last night. In exchange for telling a guy of the old “never mind the quality, feel the width” line that you don’t even remember, he told me that the new insult is to refer to someone has having been born in the 1900s.

Of course, if you were born in 1999 then you would be 23 now but you also wouldn’t be insulted by the phrase, wouldn’t take it as a dig at your age, and quite possibly wouldn’t be reading this. The unstated cut is that you’re not actually aged between 23 and a maximum 121, it’s that you are indeed 121 and that you look every pixel of your age.

There is so much I wish I’d done sooner, been able, been capable of doing sooner. And there are a handful of things I’d rather I hadn’t done yet or, indeed, at all. On balance, I should’ve done more of both.

But otherwise I’m okay with my age, okay with where I am, quite a bit more than okay, sometimes, with what I’m doing. I can cope with 2022.

I just don’t seem to be able to cope with January.

This time I’m somehow still in a fuzzy cloud post-Christmas and at exactly the same time I estimate that we are already coming up on six million days into the year.

This week, I had a Zoom chat with a friend who, when pressed, admitted that she’d had to get up early to talk to me. I am profoundly flattered that anyone would, but in that moment the idea of being able to lie in on a morning was damn appealing. I’m just not sure how I can square that with how the fact that all month I’ve been struggling to get up before 7am.

I’ve had to today, fortunately. When I send this to you, I have to drive off to a school and spend the day there as a visiting author. I did a journalism day in a school last October, but otherwise it’s been over two years since I did this and the only real surprise so far is that I’m exactly as nervous as I was last time and the time before and the time before.

There is a difference. Schools often offer me a lunch but then most of the time I forget that they have, spend the entire lunch hour gassing away with pupils and teachers, and then wonder why I’m so exceptionally hungry.

Not today. Today I’ve learned a lesson and have made sandwiches.

And then there’s also that I took a lateral flow test last night and while it was negative, while it was fine, I learned in that pregnancy-test-style wait just how there is something that makes me more nervous than going into a school. It’s the prospect of not going in when you’ve promised to.

I’m nervous enough that as much as I know I’ll enjoy it, as much as I think it’s a privilege to be asked into a school, right now I would rather make you a mug of tea and ask how you’re doing.

Let me put the kettle on.

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.

Write what you – no.

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This is doing the rounds again and maybe I’m not helping by grumbling about it. But this week I’ve been overhearing the phrase that writers should write what they know and I would like to offer that I know something about this.

I know it’s bollocks.

“Write what you know” is usually either said by people who aren’t writers, or by writers who are talking to people who aren’t and who they just want to get rid of. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, but I do know people who will ask what my current project is and then interrupt part way through the second syllable of the answer. I do tend to then wrap it up with “and, you know” while they say something about how I never tell them what I’m doing.

That’s just irritating me, that doesn’t matter. This “write what you know” idea does matter because it is damaging. There are writers who will believe it and you and I can only hope they recover.

I sound harsh, but then I intend to. If you know a time when you’ve heard it said with the best of intentions, I think it’s like it was interrupted part way through the second syllable. There is a crucial, crucial part that follows and which I’m going to have to make up since it’s never actually been said in the history of writing.

It should go thisaway:

“Write what you know, not as in writing about how it was raining when you put the bins out this morning, but rather how old that made you feel, how the knowledge that you’ve put them out a thousand times and if you’re lucky may get to do it a thousand times more, about how the repetition of a simple chore seems to you to be a metaphor for the pointlessness of life itself, for your failure to achieve anything, and how it feels like a klaxon or a Cloister Bell sounding out how little time you’ve got left before you die.”

Granted, that’s a bit specific.

It also told you more about me than I wanted to –– and that is the point of writing. Diving deeper, revealing more, reaching out. Connecting. Not describing how I forgot the council isn’t collecting garden waste this week and had to go out in the rain again to drag that bin back.

I’ve been working on a play that’s about two friends of mine. Clearly, then, I know them, I am writing what I know. Except I’m not, I’m not at all because in writing it I have learned more about them both and I’ve churned over what I thought I knew, what I’ve discovered, what I feel about them. If they were still alive, I would’ve been round their house a hundred times asking questions.

Then just technically, it’s a difficult play to write and it mustn’t ever seem like it is to the audience. When I started it, I did not know whether I was actually capable of writing what I needed, both because of these startlingly difficult technical issues, and because it’s about friends. Three or four times, I woke up in the morning not only thinking about it, but shaking. Sweating.

You don’t need to know that, the audience for the play mustn’t ever know it, but it is the best thing I’ve ever written and that is specifically because it stretched me far, far and three times far away from anything I knew how to do. Seriously, the very structure of this thing is alien to how I would say I tend to write, but it’s the correct way to tell this story. I now know that it’s the only way to tell it, too.

Sorry I can’t tell you what it is yet. You will be the first.

But for now, I have to write what you don’t know.

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.

Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser in Mad About You: Togetherness by Steve Paymer

The actors did not make it up

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There’s a pizza restaurant in London, I forget the name but it’s right in the Leicester Square theatre area. Its walls are covered with quotes, not one of which is from theatre, every one of which is from films –– and every one of which is wrong.

That’s because each famous line from a movie is attributed on these wall plaques to the actor who said it. Who said it. Didn’t write it, didn’t think it up, just said it. I have pointed out to the restaurant that I’ve said all of these quotes too, they should give me plaque.

They’re going to get back to me.

I’d understand it if they credited the line to the character and the movie, but they don’t do either. It is solely the quote and then the actor’s name.

And I think it’s tied to how you’ve seen a bizarrely frantic need for people to believe actors make up everything themselves. That can be clear in how often people or the media ask, I don’t know, Peter Mayhew just how much he’s really like Chewbacca. Or it can be more specific: actors are regularly asked if they came up with this or that superb line.

No, they didn’t.

Drama is collaboration and an excellent actor can certainly, in the moment, in the character, come up with a great line. They can’t come up with two, they can’t come up with entire scenes and dramas, and they can well come up with a line that’s brilliant in this scene but entirely screws up the ending of the movie.

I don’t actually say that to criticise, either. I know of actors who are practically proud that they only read their lines in a script and to hell with what every other character has to say, and I know of actors who are extremely successful while being like that. They’re just crap, though, what can you do?

A tremendous actor will work that script, will understand everything in it and – this is quite hard to say as a writer, but it’s true – by the end, they will indeed know their character better than you do. I still don’t trust anyone who claims “my character wouldn’t say that”, and I still do suspect they really mean “I can’t pronounce that word”. Which has happened to me.

But if you and I both accept the practicality that drama is collaboration and that everyone is working to the same goal, let me zero in on why this is really all bothering me today.

It’s partly because it bothers me all the time. The desire on the part of audiences for the actor to have made up their lines, the need for them to have done it. Two or three times now, I’ve been told of a stage show where the cast go madly off script and ad lib like crazy. Each time the person who told me this said that it made their night, that it made the show come alive so very much more than if it had been written.

And then six months later, I catch the same show further on in its tour and every single ad lib is precisely the same.

Because they were written.

Of course they were.

Which means I could be wrong here, but I just saw something I think was ad libbed – and I liked it.

I’m rewatching Mad About You, the quite bizarrely underrated 1990s sitcom by Paul Reiser and Danny Jacobson. In “Togetherness”, an episode by Steve Paymer, there’s an end titles sequence that appears to be ad libbed. It’s nothing to do with the episode, it is a callback to an equally unrelated pre-titles gag, but the studio audience roars extra hard and co-star Helen Hunt appears to break character over it.

Let me just say here that this is Helen Hunt. She’s an Oscar-winning actor, she’s a director, a producer, and a writer. If she wants to make you think she’s genuinely laughing about something, she can do it.

So I could be wrong here. Or, to use a famous line written for the show, this may not be the most right I’ve ever been.

Plus, I’ve skipped over telling you what the gag was because a) it doesn’t matter and 2) I didn’t understand it. Truly, there’s this moment, everyone loves it, I haven’t the faintest idea what it means or why it’s funny. You just know that it was something topical and perhaps that’s why I think it was ad libbed.

I’ve now looked it up and yes, it was a reference to a separate role Hunt had just played in the month that episode was recorded.

So, okay, it was a topical reference that the studio audience would get and I, thirty years later, could not. And which actually the TV viewing audience some weeks or months after the recording might not have been able to get either. That’s definitely why it was in the end titles and not a gag in the actual episode, that’s possibly why I think it was ad libbed.

But what surprises me is that I enjoyed it. I don’t understand it, and yet I enjoyed it.

Not to reveal that I have been thinking about this for four days now, but I’ve been thinking about it for four days now. The best I’ve got, the furthest I’ve got, is that I enjoyed the momentary sense of looking behind the curtain, of seeing more than the show’s writers and cast and crew presented to us.

I think when we like a show, we form a relationship with it. It’s a peculiar one since the show has never heard of us, but it’s also a quite intimate one and seeing something behind the curtain, seeing something from the wings, it’s like we’re being allowed in more than other people. It’s like our special relationship with the show is somehow affirmed.

I don’t get how we can respond like this, how we can take a real or imagined ad lib, see that it’s revealing a show is constructed, contrived, and then ignore the constructors and the contrivers and think the actors make it up. I don’t get how we can correctly know characters and yet so many people take that to mean they know the actors.

But, okay, maybe I do now understand the appeal of ad libs.

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.

Terribly British

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This week, the UK government is telling television producers that they must only make terribly British shows. O-kay…

You think of all the things going on and going wrong in the world, you think of all of them just going wrong in the UK, and this is what the government focuses on. You could presume that it’s a front, a distraction, something they think we will go for while they get on with the serious business of running the country, and I’d be okay with that. I’d even be happy enough if I thought they were just insulting our intelligence. Insult me, fine, just run the country for the benefit of the people in it instead of solely, exclusively for the benefit of the people in the Cabinet.

Anyway. Deep breath.

The government did also fire the person who, presumably, was going to implement all of this terribly British crap. They fired him one hour before he was due to give a Royal Television Society speech about it.

His identikit replacement stood up at the RTS and read his speech. I’m not entirely sure she put any more effort into the project than he had.

We’ve been here before and it has scared me before.

David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister and had a spare moment between a bacon sandwich and destroying the union, told UK filmmakers to only make hits.

If you just said something along the lines of oh, for god’s sake, hang on, there’s a little more. He may have been shockingly stupid, but he did think to give us all an example. The King’s Speech. Make hits like The King’s Speech, he said, easy.

The King’s Speech is a very good film by David Seidler. It concerns a man most of the audience hasn’t heard of, who spends 90 minutes or so struggling to make one speech. I liked it very much, but it doesn’t really have Marvel Cinematic Universe written all over it.

Today anyone making The King’s Speech 9: Chelsea Drift would presumably be told to make it more terribly British.

That totality of stupidity, the stupidity without a sliver of daylight between the stupid bits, is here coupled to a totality of arrogance. I hear this and I think of international relations, the economy, the million things I do not understand about running a country and I have to conclude that neither does the government. If they’re this stupid about something I do know, I mean stupid to this degree and to a depth so deep only their arrogance is still visible, it’s hard not to conclude that they’re the same about everything.

So the UK government is laughable and in as far as anyone listens to the UK anymore, we are being laughed at.

Look, I would be ashamed to compare television production to Britain’s history of rather more gigantically regrettable moments, but stupidity and arrogance are always the ingredients.

And that is what we British do terribly.

Okay, no, I was going to stop there because that reversal of “terribly British” into “British do terribly” is an ending. Screw endings, though, I need something to lift me back up. I only get to talk you once a week, let’s not leave it like this.

Instead, let me tell you this. Lately television is the chief thing that have been getting me through the week. Specifically “Only Murders in the Building” and, while I wait the impossibly long seven days between episodes of that, I have at last been getting into “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” too.

One of those shows is so new it isn’t over yet. The other is fifty years old. Fifty. Half a century.

You can’t ever make something deliberately to last half a hundred years and counting. But you can try. And that would be damn sight better than setting out to make shows featuring red buses, village greens, or fucking afternoon tea.