Ö÷²¥´óÐã

No, that's not an existential plea. I've been writing a script for a TV series we start filming in mid-March. When I say "I", I mean "we". Natalie Maynes is the series producer and she and I are currently writing and re-writing each other's words, and I'm now starting to dream the lines. Which is a sure sign that we need to finish this draft today.

Sometimes when viewers watch a television programme, they imagine that the presenter wrote, produced, filmed, recorded, edited and then marketed the production. It's true that some presenters would like the public to think this, but in fact television production is essentially (in the fullest sense) a collaborative endeavour.

A comment by Tim Gardam of the Guardian, reviewing Jeremy Isaacs's book, Look Me in the Eye: A Life in Television, sums up this dynamic very neatly:

Look Me in the Eye is not a book to read from cover to cover; sometimes it is too much a name check of those Isaacs has worked with. But this in itself reveals something of the man. For Isaacs, unlike most of today's TV chief executives, knows how to make a programme. Programmes are never one person's inspiration but the collective will of passionate, stubborn individual intelligences somehow bonding for a moment to create something more than any one of them alone could have imagined.

That quotation was e-mailed to me this week by Stephen Douds, the producer of our new television interview series. How's that for collaboration.

Right, back to this script ...