![\"\"](\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/08\/Ceefax-mug-and-keyboard-300x225.jpg\")
\nI don\u2019t like what I wrote last week. I don\u2019t really like what I wrote yesterday. And I\u2019m coming to regret starting this. It\u2019s just always been a fact of life for me: you do your very best and know that tomorrow you\u2019ll be wincing at how poor a writer you are.<\/p>\n
A friend has a regular habit of re-reading his scripts from, say, five or ten years ago, and having a good laugh at himself. I re-read mine and weep.<\/p>\n
Only, I was just searching for something on my Mac and I found this.<\/p>\n
020502.2235
\nTHE LAST OF THE BLONDE BOMBSHELLS
\nUK Drama 2100-2235
\nImpossibly, this is the first repeat for this charming and uplifting Alan Plater drama from two years ago.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s long been out on DVD in the US but here, curiously, not so much, so this is a rare and welcome chance to see the reunion of a (nearly) all-girl band.<\/p>\n
Judi Dench is a gem as the woman who sets out to find her disreputable pals and maybe recapture their glory days.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t be shocked: they manage it. But the game is in traveling desperately as much as it is in arriving.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If you really know your television drama history then \u201cfrom two years ago\u201d is enough to pin this text down in time. If you\u2019re not then let me offer you my congratulations and say the clue is in that string of numbers at the top. That\u2019s the instruction to BBC Ceefax\u2019s systems that the text should be removed at that date and time. It should go off air at 22:35 on 02\/05\/02.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 2002.<\/p>\n
I wrote that 15 years ago. <\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not bad. You\u2019re too young to remember Ceefax so let me explain that it would\u2019ve been tricky to get one more letter, let alone one more word, into the page that text went on. That was the limit of a TV preview and actually of any writing on Ceefax at all. You could have multiple pages but readers would not necessarily see them in the right order so every page had to stand on its own.<\/p>\n
So, given that it\u2019s so very constrained in space, I read that text and think it does the job. Tells you what\u2019s on, tells you some news about it and it gives you the plot as well as clearly being a recommendation.<\/p>\n
Plus it\u2019s got a bit of bounce to it.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the element that gives me some pleasure. I also get some from the phrase \u2018travelling desperately\u2019 which I think works even if you don\u2019t know it\u2019s a quote from another Alan Plater drama. (Misterioso, if you\u2019re wondering. My favourite.)<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m willing to tell you about this because my cold writer\/producer\u2019s head sees that it works and is no cause for weeping. But I want to tell you about it because of the way it just popped up while I was hunting for something else. Like a little peek into the past. An unexpected window into what feels now like a very different world and a very different me.<\/p>\n
We think of online writing as transient and it’s true that all my Ceefax pages vanished the day after they were aired. Most of my writing is already long gone and usually not remembered but this morning a shard of it came back to poke me in the eye. Only because it was written on computers. I have a shelf of paper notebooks I used to use but I never look at them and I can’t read my own handwriting. Whereas a gallon of Ceefax writing just came back as if I’d typed it today.<\/p>\n
I have no idea why I\u2019ve still got this text on my Mac, especially as I didn\u2019t get this machine until ten years after I wrote that. I am coming to see why my hard drive is so full, mind.<\/p>\n
I think for once that I\u2019m glad it\u2019s there. I\u2019m glad I can see that I wasn\u2019t dreadful. The fact that I wrote around 16,000 pages of BBC Ceefax has come up quite often for some reason and now I think if they were all like that, I\u2019m okay with it.<\/p>\n
The gigantic majority were written in BBC Television Centre, typing directly into the systems there, so I don\u2019t have even a significant fraction of the text on my Mac. But I have some from when I would be working at home and delivering copy: I think I\u2019d send in a week\u2019s worth of previews and reviews at a time. I feel sorry for the poor sod who then had to copy and paste them in, but I suppose I did that for other people too.<\/p>\n
Ouch. I\u2019ve just read a piece in the same document, a TV preview of some football thing.<\/p>\n
040502.1800
\nTHE FA CUP FINAL
\nBBC1 1210-1725\/Sky Sports 2 1200-1800
\nBest get your bank holiday trip to the DIY store over with in the morning, then, unless this is a dull match.<\/p>\nWhat\u2019re the odds? Arsenal meet Chelsea for a quiet, cosy kickabout with several million people roaring them on. That\u2019s all this will be.<\/p>\n
To make sure this appeals to everyone, the teams are London ones but filled with players from around the world.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s an idea of how important this is: it starts at 1500. So the build-up is twice the length of the game.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I even made football jokes. Now I\u2019m wondering if someone else wrote all of these. It would explain some things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t like what I wrote last week. I don\u2019t really like what I wrote yesterday. And I\u2019m coming to … Continue reading