But in its five-year run, I can only think of maybe a single episode that had anything even distantly to do with time and that\u2019s been my obsession since even before that show. I\u2019m working on a collection of short stories on the theme of time right now and part of me thinks it\u2019s the best thing I\u2019ve ever written while another part of me hopes this means I\u2019ll finally be done with it.<\/p>\n
For time is just riddled through everything I write. I mean, yes, Doctor Who radio dramas, it\u2019d be odd if those didn\u2019t touch on the subject. <\/p>\n
But I can see it in plays I write. I got fired off the TV soap Crossroads once, have I mentioned that? In retrospect I can see that one of my gags in the show was about time. (That wasn\u2019t why I was fired. I was ditched because I was rubbish.) One of my rather more successful pieces of writing and actually one of my favourite short stories of mine is Time Gentlemen Please and each time I\u2019ve performed it, someone in the audience has been convinced I\u2019m as ill as the character. Perhaps I am.<\/p>\n
Even regular conversations turn to this damn topic. Last Saturday I had a workshop that we all paused while we talked about the Grandfather Paradox. (You might not know the name but you definitely know the idea: it\u2019s the thing that says you can\u2019t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn\u2019t be born and so wouldn\u2019t go back in time to kill him.)<\/p>\n
Two days before that I was at an art and poetry event. After the main readings, the artist Sue Challis<\/a> showed me a painting of hers and poet Nadia Kingsley<\/a> stood by it giving me personal performance of a poem inspired by that painting. They made me cry. Because to my mind, both poem and painting are about time.<\/p>\n And this is on my mind now, other than because it always is, because I just today learned that this year is the 60th anniversary of Phillipa Pearce\u2019s book, Tom\u2019s Midnight Garden<\/a>.<\/p>\n That book about time is as dear to me as an old friend. But it\u2019s the BBC dramatisation that ignited a lifelong friendship and this lifelong compulsion.<\/p>\n At 17:15 on Monday 7 January, 1974, BBC1 aired a dramatisation by John Tully and produced by Dorothea Brooking. (Quick story? A friend mentioned in an email that she had some of Brooking\u2019s archive and I wrote back instantaneously saying just DOROTHEA BROOKING? We were working on a project together and stuff that, I wanted to see Brooking\u2019s archive.) You can watch a lot of this version of Tom\u2019s Midnight Garden on YouTube<\/a>, though unfortunately not all of it. There\u2019s no commercial release. And if Tom\u2019s Midnight Garden were ever to come out on shiny disc or streaming on demand, my 1974 version wouldn\u2019t be it. Because there was a better one in 1989. And my one was a remake of a 1968 one. I\u2019ve never been able to see that and I don\u2019t even know if it still exists, but if you wanted quality you\u2019d release 1989 and if you wanted history, you\u2019d release 1968.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not even going to disagree with that: I think the 1974 version is perfunctory, it\u2019s squeezed down into too few episodes and it is particularly cheaply done. <\/p>\n But it\u2019s mine.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know that every writer has one strong obsession or actually that they necessarily recognise it in themselves if they do. But surely it\u2019s got to be rare for one to be able to pinpoint to the very minute when it started.<\/p>\n I\u2019m only relieved it didn\u2019t also get me into gardening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, I think this is pretty rare. Not only can I tell you to the year when I decided I … Continue reading ![\"Tom\u2019s](\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/03\/AD282E39-3FEC-4685-B43A-A14321794E75-219x300.jpeg\")
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