Twice in the last week \u2013 once with you, once on BBC Radio Foyle \u2013 I got to natter about how my two current TV obsessions are preposterously different. They’re the current Only Murders in the Building and the fifty-year-old The Mary Tyler Moore Show.<\/p>\n
Only, Only Murders is only about a podcast, right? So it only took me six episodes of Only to realise that surely, surely there would be a podcast about the show. Lying in the bath last night, I listened to the first episode and its interview with Only Murder co-creator, co-writer and all-showrunner, John Hoffman.<\/p>\n
Pretty much just as the motion-sensor lights in the bathroom switched off, I sat up, splashing water onto the iPhone and, as it happens, turning the lights back on.<\/p>\n
Because Hoffman was describing the process of writing this Only Murders series and he said that every single night during it, he would watch two episodes of another show.<\/p>\n
Yes.<\/p>\n
It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show.<\/p>\n
I suppose both are comedies, though the Mary show was straight sitcom and Only Murders is comedy drama. I suppose both are half hours, but Mary is 25 minutes and Only Murders can go up to 35 if it likes.<\/p>\n
There’s no connection in the subject, the tone, the characters, and yet I get it. Hoffman watched all seven seasons of the Mary show, two episodes a night and it fed into writing Only Murders in the Building.<\/p>\n
I am taken by this because of the odds that the two shows I look forward to are the same two for this man I don’t know, and especially since do you have the faintest clue how many sitcoms or comedy dramas or just television programmes there have been in the last half a century? Go pick your own, Hoffman, I’ve got this one.<\/p>\n
But then there is also this. On Tuesday, I read a script I wrote about 20 years ago and let’s say it was shite altogether.<\/p>\n
“It was shite.”<\/p>\n
However, it was also unquestionably me. I could hear my voice, see my tone, recognise certain descriptions and actually also particular patterns and ways of describing things.<\/p>\n
And I could also see what prompted most of the script. A character says “you’ve got my vote” and I know Grosse Pointe Blank was on my mind. A description of mine includes the phrase “certain-sure” and I like that, I like the rhythm of it, I like the amplification-by-tautology, but I don’t like how I believed I’d thought of it in a script earlier this year. It’s scary that I’ve just found it again in a Self Distract blog from 2015<\/a> where I appear to obsess over the word “bollocks.”<\/p>\n Everything you know, everything you feel, goes into writing and then it only bloody comes out again, too. I don’t think it should come out as baldly, overtly obvious as it is with my scripts, but I used to like how I believed I could adapt to any house style, fit in with any production or any publication’s writing and now I’m glad that I can’t. I found my voice and apparently can’t shut up.<\/p>\n A friend told me once that she could recognise my writing in a particular piece that didn’t have a byline, that wasn’t meant to be one person’s writing. I liked that very much.<\/p>\n Though I’m pretty sure that was the same friend who this week told me she never watches my 58keys YouTube channel<\/a> and she never reads this Self Distract.<\/p>\n I told her I preferred you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twice in the last week \u2013 once with you, once on BBC Radio Foyle \u2013 I got to natter about … Continue reading