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My episode of Waterloo Road is on iPlayer

It aired a couple of days before Christmas. On the whole, I was pleased with it. Tom Chambers - as Max - did a magnificent job as a control freak losing control. Jenna-Louise Coleman was a great Lindsay, and made a few purposefully melodramatic scenes quite emotional (I thought.) Thanks - again - to the script department for loads of support during a pressured and intense development process.

It's on iPlayer... here.

Since then, I've written a couple of episodes of Emmerdale (and I'm starting a third). It's a nice change of pace... gentle humour, drama with a slightly warmer heart, and I'm really enjoying it.

Space, jazz and Afrofuturism, tonight on Radio 3

Last week was fun... interviewing jazz writers John Corbett and Graham Lock for a feature, tonight, about jazz during the space race era. It's a short piece on Radio 3's Jazz on 3, timed to play alongside a live concert by ex-Sun Ra alto saxophonist Marshall Allen. I was interested in finding out whether all the cosmic references in jazz in the 50s and (particularly) 60s meant anything... and what the space race meant to jazz. Details here.

Watching David Lynch is good for our brains

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or Lynch's "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.

They call it "meaning threat", and say it motivates us to reach outside our comfort zones to manufacture meaning and sense. It makes us work harder... which is, apparently, a good habit to get into.

I dare you to ask Josh Olson to read your script

I will not read your fucking script. At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I'm a dick. But if you're interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that it is, in fact, you who are the dick in this situation, please read on.

What will happen if Apple DOESN'T announce a tablet computer?

Apple's silence on the subject must surely be construed as tacit confirmation that the much-rumoured but, as yet, entirely imaginary product is about to be launched. If not, shouldn't they break their silence and issue a firm denial now, before stumbling in and out of a disappointing September event, and watching their share price dip? Don't they owe that to the shareholders?

The First Post asked for my take on the subject. It's here.

So what have I been doing since Spring?

Not contributing anything to my blog, clearly. I've been keeping extremely busy with an episode of WATERLOO ROAD for the BBC. And the problem is that - for obvious reasons (secrecy regarding the plot, for instance) - there hasn't been much to say... other than it was hard work but a lot of fun and involved working with some people who are very good at being creative under pressure. It's episode 9 of the next series... and I'll post a transmission date when I'm sure of one.

Right now, I'm working on a bit of radio (about avant-garde big band leader Sun Ra), attempting to finish a film script that's been gestating just long enough and developing an idea for a TV series with a trusted friend.

This blog began as a way of posting bits of my own journalism as they were published. The problem is that whenever I take on a screenwriting job, the journalism dwindles to next to nothing, and screenwriting's my own personal headache... not much to say around here. So, I'm moving my own journalism over to the right (☛) and I'm going to turn the blog into something a little more like, well, a blog, posting links to film, culture and technology stories wherever I find them.

Back soon...

The most ambitious search engine since Google

Next month, British mathematician Stephen Wolfram launches the internet's most ambitious search engine since Google. It might not be blessed with the catchiest name in tech-biz, but according to believers WolframAlpha will change the very game of Internet search. Cynics, however, are calling it a colossal act of scientific hubris, a stunt that could still end in disaster.

For The First Post.

The Wire creater David Simon, on the state of the media

Simon, cultivating a style as gritty as his characters, takes it personally: he claims that the motivation for everything he writes is "revenge". His shows are revenge against those he holds responsible for the suffering and dysfunction of Baltimore, and revenge against the owners and craven editors who pulled the teeth of the watchdog.

An ex-journalist who's fallen way out of love with newspapers describes why it's too late for the industry, in an interesting piece in The First Post.

A Google profile

Don’t be evil. According to Google Inc lore, it was a programmer who, in the summer of 2001, coined what would become the company’s corporate motto. Cool and casual, it encapsulated Silicon Valley’s unbuttoned, post-hippie business culture. But five years later, at buttoned-up Davos, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was explaining how his company had been forced to invent a more pragmatic “evil scale”.

For The National, an interesting Abu Dhabi-based English language newspaper.

Got kids? Do they watch TV?

Try Paradise Café, a new series for CBBC, created by Paul Gerstenberger, and shot on the Cook Islands. An edgy, supernatural comedy for the family, it's going out on CBBC, at 5.15pm on Tuesdays, and it's available online via the usual BBC iPlayer channels. I wrote the fourth fifth episode - due out in about ten 17 days - and the whole experience of working on the show was a real pleasure... everybody involved developed a real affection for what turned out to be an ambitious and original drama.