I know that writing is meant to be a painful, horrible, torturous process involving suffering at every step of the way. I’ve never been quite that authentic as a writer, but certainly there are days when you labour over something and it feels like a drudge. And the work that comes out just reads (to yourself, at least) appropriately like sludge. But just occasionally there are some bright, happy, shining days where it all goes right despite your best attempts to foul it up.

Last week I started writing a new long-form fiction project for the first time this year (a shameful admission) as of late I’ve been mostly distracted by keeping up with motor sports writing. At times this has taken over whole weekends, or even long weekends such as the one just past in which every motor sports series in the world suddenly seemed to hold events at the same time.

The most exciting of them was the F1 Grand Prix at Spa, Belgium – which was a terrific race. Unfortunately it wasn’t one of the ones that I was slated to write-up for crash.net and instead I was covering the IndyCar race from Sonoma, California later that evening. Whereas the problem with the Spa race was packing all the incidents into a single coherent post shorter than War and Peace, the Somona race presented an entirely different problem: that quite literally, nothing happened.

Honestly, I could write up the whole race in a short paragraph: “Top five cars finished in the same order they started after 75 laps of following each other around. A couple of minor crashes toward the end failed to affect the crucial results and affected only midfielders.” Trouble is, if you’re a writer who is supposed to be turning in a lovingly crafted 1000-word race report on an event, then handing in a 36-word stand-first instead isn’t going to really cut it.

I’ve often had this sort of ‘stage fright’ before where I’ve wondered, just before a motor race starts, whether I would find anything to write about afterwards. Invariably the race delivers and there’s a load of stuff to cover, so much so that trying to condense it becomes the overwhelming problem (and one I always struggled to satisfactorily overcome and have always ended up with reports that are too long, I confess.) But this IndyCar race at Sonoma is the first time I’ve got to the end of a race and suddenly thought: “F*** me, I have absolutely nothing to write about.”

Actually it’s a two-fold problem, because while it’s always possible to just pad it out with some witless prose at the end of the day, if you do that you’re doing a disservice to the readers: if a race was dull and boring and non-eventful than that’s what the story should say. It shouldn’t make it artificially hyped up or you’re lying and deceiving your readers.

Given this starting point, I was very happy therefore at how the final piece turned out that you can read on crash.net if you care to. It’s over 2000 words long, but up to a half of that is sourced driver quotes and hence don’t count for my purposes here. The rest of it tells the story of the non-event, making the most of the two mid-field incidents near the end, but also not hiding the fact that this was a deeply dull race in which everyone was just playing team loyalties and holding position. In fact it says so, repeatedly – in I hope a dryly humorous fashion that ends up making it a more fun and interesting piece than many of the incident-packed race reports that I’ve diligently put together from the race synopsis in the past.

I’ve rarely felt quite so smugly self-satisfied as when I finally published that piece. I’d gone from literally not having a clue what to write, to delivering a piece that was both accurate and didn’t flinch from properly reporting the dull nature of the event, but which in itself was still hopefully a good and entertaining read. In fact I was a little jealous about all those people who would (I sincerely hope) enjoy reading the piece in its own right and in doing so would be forever spared the two hours of having to watch the original race that it represented, as I’d had to do.

I think perhaps it’s weekends like this that are having a massively improving effect on my longform fiction writing as well. For one thing, after a frenzied weekend of motorsports to cover on a deadline, sitting down on Tuesday and rolling out 3500 words of fiction from my carefree imagination seemed like a holiday compared with having to research every little detail and put it together coherently in a short space of time.

With the fiction, my mind goes to work overnight and the next morning I have some idea what I want to write. I can sit down at the keyboard, my fingers get busy, and before I know it I’ve somehow got to the word count and it’s not been a strain at all. It’s rather miraculous, in fact. Whereas with the motor sports writing, you can’t start until the race is underway; and once it’s finished, the piece has to be written and up as soon as possible. No time for long walks along the riverbank to find one’s muse, it just has to get done.

It’s fine training for writing in general and seems to be doing wonders for my creative writing, although at the same time the motor sports work does eat up almost all of the Friday, Saturday and Sunday time which means the creative writing had to be condensed into four days of the week, which is exactly not what the writing self-help books tell you to do. They will all insist that you should write continuously, every day, at the same time each day, and that to pause or hesitate or take a day off is probably fatal to the cause.

That was certainly my fear when I returned to the creative endeavours on Tuesday: would I be able to pick it up after several days ‘off’ for the other writing? Would there be a noticeable join in the text? Would it flow, or would I just sit there unable to think of what happened next? Even after Tuesday went well (so well I even merrily skipped away and did three reviews for Take The Short View while I was at it as a sort of literary dessert or cheese board) I was still thinking: maybe that was just a one-off, a sort of “this is everything that was stored up from before your hiatus, but don’t expect anything more once this has gone.” So I was a full of trepidation on Wednesday as I sat down, wondering if this time the well would be dry.

Nope. Actually, better even than the day before. I massively overran my word count and practically had to drag myself away from the keyboard mid-scene to finally bring the writing day to a halt.

Not that all days will be like this. God knows, I’ve had days where it’s been a real effort to write anything; where the words will not flow; where the result on paper is truly execrable and you just want to give it all up and never write another word ever again in your life. Any writer who tells you otherwise is almost certainly deceiving you – or themselves. And we hear a lot about such days from writers who love to martyr themselves and romanticise their periods of writer’s block so that we all know how much suffering and effort they’ve put into the final product, as if that will somehow make us like their book more.

I’ll have days like that too. Maybe today will be one of them. Or tomorrow, or next week – it’ll come, as the inevitable by-product of the act of putting letters on paper in the first place. And I’ll whine about those days, I can assure you – you will suffer, dear reader, mark my words, just so that you will duly appreciate the miracle of there being any end result whatsoever, and are perhaps more forgiving of its faults as a result!

But fair’s fair. If I expect you to share the copious bad days and the cliched long dark nights of the soul, at the very least I should also share with you the good days when things go really rather well. The days when it’s even possible to read back through some of the product without flinching, and instead to find yourself thinking: “Hmm, not bad. Heh, that bit’s funny. Maybe it’s not terrible after all.”

Such days are good days. Really, really good days.

Actually, I did write a blog piece about it. It’s on my hard disk somewhere, I’m sure I could find it if I looked. But I wisely held off posting it, because it was an incoherent outpouring of rage about the whole outcome that really would have done no one any good, least of all me. Better not to say anything at all until the blood had stopped boiling.

It mostly has now. Now I’m just in the ‘sadness and regret’ phase of grief, having moved through denial and anger and into acceptance.

It still amazes me that after at least half a dozen reviews and restructuring plans for COI, all of which agreed that COI was at heart still a valuable and useful body albeit one in need of considerable change and transformation to meet the needs of a 21st century government, that the powers that be should then abruptly set all those reports and recommendations aside and just close the whole thing down.

All I could think is that one of three things had happened: 1) that the decision was based on pure political ideology and was the plan all along, and the ministers were just annoyed when none of the reviews they commissioned came back with that recommendation in the meantime so that they had to do the deed themselves; 2) that the question of ‘what to do about COI?’ had simply dragged on too long and was now bogged down in so much haggling that the minister, Francis Maude, essentially decided: to hell with this, just get rid of it so I don’t have to take any more meetings about this irritation anymore; or 3) that once COI and the Tees Report lost its principle advocates (Matt Tee and ex-COI CEO Mark Lund) then it had no defenders from those who surged into the vacuum to hack it to death.

None of the three options speak well of the process of government, I fear. I’d understand it more if in coming to the decision they did, they at least had an idea of what they wanted instead: after all, it’s not like this hadn’t been thought about for over 12 months now, so it’s not exactly asking a lot for them to at least know what they would do once the decision to scrap COI and any possible successor bodies was made. But apparently it is asking too much of them because even all this time after the decision it seems no one has a clue how the shutdown of COI will be handled or where its functions are going.

In the meantime, the old COI is dying anyway. The staff who are its lifeblood are obviously and rightly looking to the future and starting to move on, as highlighted by yesterday’s news that my old boss at COI, Nick Jones, now has a foot in Number 10 as Head of Digital there. Bravo to Nick, and I wish him all the best – as I do to all those who are now enacting their exit strategies and getting the hell out of Dodge before it becomes a ghost town. I wish you all the best – and exciting, rewarding and fun new careers ahead of you. To Infinity and Beyond!

For myself, I’ll just have another moment of sadness and regret as I watch the passing into history of COI, the like of which we will never see again. Maybe it’s right that we don’t – maybe COI outlived its purpose a decade or two ago – but such thoughts are for another time and a different blog post.

Obviously, Apple will miss Jobs – how could it not? He transformed the company, and through Apple he transformed our lives. That’s literally no exaggeration, as I sit here surrounded by my iMac, iPhone, iPad, iPod …

But perhaps one of Steve Jobs top ten achievements is how he finally managed to write himself out of the Apple story. A few years back, when the news about his ill health first broke, he and Apple were blasted for (a) concealing the information, and (b) having no transition plan, no line of succession for a post-Jobs era. They were right to be criticised on both counts.

Fast forward to last week: Apple and Jobs have used the intervening time to bring along and put in place the people they needed for the transition. Jobs’ long heath sabbaticals had allowed the transition to be road-tested and the next generation leaders to become established and well known in the industry. By the time Jobs handed in his letter of resignation it no longer seemed alarming or unplanned for, just confirmation of what we knew had been the situation for some time. Apple hadn’t crumbled in the meantime with Jobs off ill, and so we are reassured that it wasn’t going to go horribly wrong now he’s stepped down, either.

The moment for succession has arrived; it had been planned for; and it has worked, in just the way that five years ago it never could have.

In the meantime the general reaction of the blogosphere was a slew of near-eulogies for Steve Jobs, which slightly irked me – he hasn’t died after all, just stepped down as CEO. That’s no cause for weeping and wailing and the rending of garments. Not yet, at least.

Of course in the back of our minds we wonder about Steve Jobs’ health and prognosis in the light of his resignation. But you know what? It really isn’t any of our business now. Five years ago, when Jobs and the Apple board were borderline-illegally concealing relevant information about the company from shareholders by refusing to discuss the state of Jobs’ health, it was very much a matter of public concern and debate. But not now, not that he’s stepped down as CEO and left the shop in the hands of Tim Cook – now it’s a private matter for Jobs once again, and rightly so.

So it really is none of our damn business, and I’m not going to comment or prognosticate on the issue at all. Instead I’ll just wish Steve Jobs and his family all the best for the future, whatever it may hold, and thank him and the team at Apple for the ways in which they have contributed to all of our lives. And also, thanks for not screwing up the company in the leaving of it.

I’d taken the last couple of Grands Prix off in terms of writing a post-race report on what happened. It’s not because I’m losing interest in F1 or that the races themselves weren’t very good (Barcelona is usually a bit of a snoozer but was enlivened immeasurably by new technology and a new tyre provider, while Monaco is my favourite race of the year and was packed with incident and controversy) – but simply that May got so overcrowded with motor racing that I had to prioritise my work for crash.net instead and put GP2, IndyCar and NASCAR first as explained in last week’s post.

Strangely, though, after just two races “off” on hiatus, I found my attachment to F1 wobbling despite how good the races themselves were. Without the investment of writing about it afterwards, I felt strangely removed from it, as though F1 was becoming a “secondary” interest compared with those that I was still covering and writing up. It made me realise how much the process of writing about it now connects me with the event and the sport itself: because I was still doing that for GP2, NASCAR and IndyCar, they were becoming closer and more pre-eminent to me.

I even doubted that I would get around to writing up this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix; having been on hiatus for two races, surely another one wouldn’t matter? Especially because, thanks to the IndyCar event at the weekend being in the middle of Saturday night, I was feeling a bit tired and wiped out by the evening and wondered whether I would just doze off – especially when the race was interrupted by a two hour rain delay that must have infuriated BBC1 viewers wondering what had happened to the 8.15pm showing of Antiques Roadshow just to make way for grown men staring at rain puddles.

Actually my big problem after the race itself was: how to write about four hours of events that made absolutely no sense? Far from the old processional days of old when I first started to do these reports in the 90s that made for easy translations into a linear narrative, recent races have thrown up so many incidents that whole theses could be written about any one of two dozen race incidents. How to boil that down to a single race report that made any sort of sense and yet still do the race as a whole sufficient justice?

This is of course a universal problem facing any writer: how to take any story and characters that the writer has in their mind and chip away all the other details that aren’t quite so important in order to leave the best possible end result? It’s like a sculptor chipping away at the marble in order to reveal the statue of David that he knows is within, if only he can get rid of the distractions; but that means discarding so much fine marble in the process that you could weep for the waste, which to another artist could have been a different wonderful piece altogether.

So it is with a Grand Prix, and especially so with this week’s where there was just so much to cover than you just have to absorb it all and decide which pieces of the marble raw material you wish to keep, and which – sadly – have to go.

So I decided early on that this would be a story of one team – of McLaren. The story would be from their view, from the depths of despair in the early laps when their drivers took each other out, to the heights of the most extraordinary victory. But so do that I knew I was leaving to one side just as many if not more amazing stories, such as Michael Schumacher’s dramatic return to form after looking on the verge of quitting (again) because he wasn’t enjoying his return from retirement; of the travails of the Ferrari team; or the heartbreak for Sebastian Vettel who threw away a race win. All of these were secondary footnotes in the service of the McLaren story and many others not mentioned at all, but someone is sure to be writing an account which centres on them which is wholly different to my version.

I’m not pretending that the end result is some work of art comparable with David, it’s “Just Another F1 Race Report” at the end of the day. But I’m pretty pleased with it, not least because when I started I genuinely didn’t know how on earth to even begin capturing the events and the sense of the afternoon – most of which had gone by so fast that I could barely remember it let alone keep it straight in my head – and yet by the end it it was all there, on paper. All the key facts, but also all brought to life. It’s this challenge of bringing some sense and order to complete chaos, no matter how overwhelming the basic initial pool of facts and events is at the start, that gives me a real sense of achievement by the end.

It’s actually not unlike the type of work I used to do in the past: as a digital media consultant, I’d go into a situation and be presented with a load of facts info-dumped on me and be expected to make sense of them, form a narrative and be able to not just understand and interpret them but come up with some sort of “answer” to boot. That was the job, and no matter how difficult or how unlikely it seemed to be at the start, we did exactly that each and every time – just like the process of taking a real life event such as a Grand Prix and making order out of chaos there, too.

Whether writing or consultancy, when it all goes right, it’s really one of the best feelings you can have. Although I’d imagine Jenson Button would say there are even better legal highs and that he’s in the middle of one after his Canadian victory!

As someone who has loved and admired Steven Moffat’s work ever since the early days of the superb The Press Gang, this should be a no-brainer question and a short blog post declaring everything is just brilliant and wonderful. Should be … But I’m afraid it isn’t. There’s something nagging away at me, something making me uneasy about the future of the show we love so much.

(And this was before today’s Private Eye story suggesting there was trouble in the production team and that there might not even be a 2012 season, rumours subsequently squashed by a BBC announcement confirming 14 more episodes have been commissioned.)

This is the battle of demon’s run, the Doctor’s darkest hour, he’ll rise higher than ever before, and then fall so much further.

It’s hard not to agree that the Doctor has truly risen higher than he ever has before right now, at least as far as Doctor Who fans are concerned: we have the writer/producer we admire more than any other, who is at the top of his game and producing the most fabulous scripts, season arcs and characters. Matt Smith has made a genuinely brilliant Doctor; the threesome combination of the Tardis crew has given us something authentically different and new after too many years of the tired Doctor/female companion formula – even before we add the fantastic recurring character of River Song who we just yearn to join full-time. The production team also seem to have managed to get over the funding squeeze that compromised key moments in season 5 with below-par CGI, because season 6 has all looked fabulous (well, save for one Flesh Jen monster CGI too far…) – even before the impressive jaunt to America that added to the sense of sheer scale and substance.

But I can’t shake the feeling that this almighty high does indeed potentially come before the biggest fall and darkest hour, and that there are signs and portents that should worry all Who fans at least a little.

Some of these are external matters: the tabloids loved reporting that viewing figures for the early episodes were sharply down, and while this was not entirely accurate (the iPlayer/view on demand figures pretty much reversed that situation so it’s more a sign of an error in the scheduling of the show at 6pm or so on warm, sunny May and June evenings that’s a mistake of the network programmers rather than the show itself) it did lead the papers to gripe about how it’s no longer a family show, that it’s too dark, too scary, too bloody complicated for children now.

Actually the children are fine by all accounts, and follow it perfectly – as least as much as they need to. It’s the adults who are feeling lost, puzzled, worried or horrified. But that’s still a problem for the show, because this is the BBC’s family tent-pole offering, and if the adults are scratching their heads and shrugging before going off to do something else – or deciding it’s not suitable for the little’uns – then it’s undermining a major element of the show’s success and profile, both of which are vital to keeping the show mainstream and properly funded.

When Russell T Davies took on the task of regenerating the show in 2005, he was commendably open about how this was the most commercial, market-tested, focus-grouped project he’d ever done. Every last bit of it had to be hand-crafted to make sure it hit the market properly, delivered the whole-family audience, spun off the merchandising and won the awards. It had to, if this wasn’t to be a one-season flop. Artistic integrity be blowed: to make any expensive TV show, first you have to make the show a proven success to earn your right to experiment. It might sound cynical, but it’s survival in the modern broadcast arena and RTD knew it better than anyone. I’m sure a little piece of him died everytime he had to subjugate his artistic inclinations in favour of ensuring the commercial success, but he pulled it off: he took a revival that no one gave much of a chance of really working and delivered to the BBC’s their biggest international blockbuster property.

As a result, Steven Moffat doesn’t have the same pressures: the show is a hit right now and he doesn’t have to permanently look over his shoulder fearing cancellation. That security has given the show an undoubted confidence and swagger; and in any case, Moffat is not the kind of person to ever allow anything to override his artistic integrity. He will do the show his way no matter what, believing it’s the best for the show: focus groups and market testing be damned.

It’s admirable, and arguably is giving us a better, higher calibre show than we’ve ever seen before as least as far as hard-core fans are concerned. But it’s also markedly different from the show that was reborn under RTD that we grew to know and love in its own right. Davies might have had his problems as head writer (and not really seeming to grasp what a science fiction story really was, and continually relying on cheap deus ex machina get-outs were definitely among them) but every episode was suffused with a sense of love of the show and with a huge feeling of fun that made it accessible and enjoyable by everyone of any age or level of interest.

You don’t get that with Moffat’s seasons. I have no doubt that he loves the show every bit as much as RTD or you and I do, but he never allows that passion to override his story judgement – or to show through in the episodes themselves. Instead they’re far more coolly cerebral, intricate and complex, always eschewing the obvious even when it might end up frustrating the viewer. He is not writing for the casual fan who may dip in and out, miss a week or read a paper at the same time: this is a show for people who watch. And rewatch. And sit and think and talk about it for a week afterwards. And even if you do all that, it’s still likely to have scrambled your brain and leave you with a headache (as the end of “Day of the Moon” did for me, I confessed at the time.)

It’s asking a lot of viewers to submit themselves to this mental overload; casual fans will depart, and even die hard fans have been struggling to sustain the level of absolute concentration the show now demands. Instead of the fun, easy, family viewing under RTD, the show just got worryingly difficult, fan-ish and closed-up by comparison.

For those fans who push through and keep watching, it’s worth every minute. It comes together like the most wonderful puzzle box, and not only can you appreciate how perfectly it all comes together but you can also see how all the clues were left in plain sight all along and it only seemed complicated but actually you really did understand it all along after all, giving a lovely frisson of feeling like you’ve cracked it and are worthy of being one of the Whovian nation – and that your brain isn’t as broken as you thought after all.

But then we hit another snag: where does the show go from here? After being raised to such eye-popping heights, what’s next?

It’s hard to imagine the show going back to the nice, fun “adventure of the week” format. Indeed it tried that with “The Curse of the Black Spot” and how poor that episode felt, even though in previous RTD seasons that would have been a perfectly fine albeit average episode (no offence intended to RTD.) Not every episode can be a Silents/Flesh/Gaiman/Demons Run blockbuster every single week, but these episodes have raised the bar so high in season 6 that a merely ordinary episode is now a deep disappointment. You pity anyone who is tasked to take over from Moffat, because no one can reach the sort of heights he’s been delivering this season – and anything less is doing to be the Doctor’s darkest hour and his furthest fall (and potentially at worst, his latest cancellation.)

This problem is echoed in a development in the Doctor’s character in the show itself: he’s become so big, so epic, so unbeatable that the loveable old eccentric “mad man in a box” has never seemed so far away. These days he can wipe out entire Cyber battle fleets as a rhetorical flourish in a pre-credits teaser, or reboot the universe, or send aliens running away in fright just by reading them his CV. This started back in RTD/David Tennant’s era with “The Christmas Invasion”, was echoed in “The Eleventh Hour” at the start of the Moffat/Matt Smith era, but has now becoming a recurring problem with both “The Pandorica Opens” and “A Good Man Goes to War” both essentially focusing on it.

Quite simply, there is no one left who is more powerful than the Doctor. He is a God. Even the Daleks – who were revamped so successfully in season 1 as the ultimate nemesis of the Time Lords and the only race able to defeat them in the Time War – are now so “reliably beatable” that Moffat himself has concluded that they have no credibility left and have to be rested from the show. But if not the Daleks – who can threaten the Doctor anymore? It’s rather like the ‘scope creep’ that infected the character of Superman, in which a character who could initially simply jump high and run fast suddenly became invincible and as a result lost both empathy with the readership and also potential plots. How could Superman bear to spend his time dealing with muggings with all his powers?

So to it is with the Doctor. He’s now so powerful that nothing really seems to threaten him anymore. Some lovely dialogue in “A Good Man Goes To War” stressed how he is now more myth than regular person: how “Doctor” is becoming a galaxy-wide synonym for “great man of learning” or “warrior” depending on your point of view (apparently an idea Moffat had in 1995 according to some links on the Internet pointing to ‘proof’, but we’ll take these with a pinch of salt for now – you can fake anything on the Internet. Even Moon landings, I hear.) Did you spot the sublime way that Rory is made to see that this is happening to him, too: as he consoled Commander Strax, he realised he was talking to a warrior who had become a nurse, while he himself was a nurse who was now a centurion warrior? An uncomfortable realisation for both.

The stakes have been raised too high too many times: the show has seemingly killed off the Doctor, Amy and/or Rory too often, just so that we feel something bad really did/could happen, but it’s backfired and now they’ve all died and restored in too many ways that so we just roll our eyes, say “oh, not again” and wait for the plot to unravel and restore everyone to life.

Moffat seems acutely aware of this “Godhood” problem with the Doctor now, and it’s why the trope has been returned to in “A Good Man Goes To War” with dialogue specifically riffing on this (which in turn is an echo of dialogue that RTD’s Davros used on Tennant’s Doctor in “Journey’s End”.) I suspect Moffat’s overall intentions for the current convoluted plot arc are to do something about this “all-powerful” Doctor and restore him back to something like his old original self, the eccentric traveller.

The trouble is that the genie is out of the box, and we can’t go home again: would we be remotely satisfied with a show of a group of friends amiably poking around investigating a deserted city or scrapping with some cavemen?

Steven Moffat’s a sharp guy with far greater writing and creative skills than I possess – maybe he’s figured all this out and has an answer for us, and that’s what we’re heading to. We should certainly hope so, for the sake of the future survival of the show hinges upon it. Far more than the side questions of identity of River Song or whether the Doctor will retrieve Rory and Amy’s baby, this is the most important and pressing question facing the Whovian Nation this morning as we head into the summer recess.

When it comes to my budding writing career, May turned out to be the busiest and most frantic months work of all time. Not particularly profitable, mind you – but extremely valuable in terms of what I’ve learnt about writing both fiction and non-fiction, which I thought I should share. (Even though the writing concerned is on motorsports, don’t let you put that off – the subject matter I was writing about is almost irrelevant to the wider themes of this blog post. Honest. Trust me!)

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been writing “race reports” of various motorsports events for many years, originally for The WELL online community, then briefly on this blog before being spun out to a separate companion blog; it was an outlet for my frustrating writing aspirations, and I thought it would help improve my quality of writing (it did) and also train me to be able to sit down and actually produce writing on demand rather than sitting in front of a blank screen feigning writer’s block – and the whole NaNoWriMo experience last November proved just how effectively all these years of writing pieces effectively on a tight deadline really had been in making it comparatively easy to sit down and Just Do It when it mattered.

In the middle of last year I was asked by a professional motorsports website called crash.net if I would ‘syndicate’ some of my material there as well as they were without a correspondent covering NASCAR Sprint Cup, IndyCar and GP2. Since I was writing these pieces anyway it was a no-brainer to cross-post the material there as well, but now it meant that I had a vastly increased audience for these pieces. Where before I’d been writing purely for my own entertainment (even if the WordPress stats told me a few dozen people might actually be reading these things), it was nothing compared to the audience that the pieces were now in front of, and who were not afraid to make their feelings known on any aspect of what was being written about (or how it was written.)

It’s a scientific axiom that the mere act of observation changes the thing that’s being observed, and that’s certainly true here: I had to start considering how these were being written, what the audience might be interested in, how to best deliver a good coverage to them.

Very quickly, the limitations of delivering ‘just’ a race report after that week’s event were evident. It’s rather like producing a film that consists of just an extended action sequence: from the minute the curtain goes up, it’s all explosions, fist fights, gun flights, yelling. But you have no idea what’s going on, what they’re fighting about, who the good guys are – it’s just sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing at all. It might be viscerally thrilling for the first two or three minutes, but by ten you’ll just have a headache. By 15 you’ll have walked out, no matter how good a narrative depiction of the events of the action sequence are rendered.

That’s because in order to work, the action sequence needs two things: context and character. And just as it’s true in fiction (whether cinema, TV, stage or novels) so it’s true in making the journalism work. The only difference is that whereas in a film or book all the parts would be in one piece of work, here the oeuvre would have to consist of dozens and hundreds of individual pieces contributing to the overall whole. And just to add to the difficulty, I would have no idea from one day to another what tomorrow’s storylines would be, and yet still had to knit them together into something that overall would provide all that necessary context and character regardless.

Just like a novelist, that meant identifying storylines that would be of interest to people, and identifying characters that could be introduced, fleshed out and followed – so that when it came to the races themselves, the activity would mean something. People might actually care what was going on, rather than just being expected to follow descriptions of on-track race activity no matter how well (or not) it was written.

So now my brief had fleshed out to finding interesting news stories, following them through, producing driver profiles and interviews, and other background material such as explanations of the history of an event or how the rules worked. It was all the context and character that anyone would need to have to invest in anything else we went on to produce in out motorsports coverage. It was a lot more work than originally envisaged, but it would be worth it.

Then along came May, and suddenly it all went a little bit berserk with a classic case of “scope creep” writ large.

The original idea with my crash.net submissions, you’ll remember, was to provide a race coverage for three different series, with an average of one race every 1-2 weeks. No problem. Except that at the start of May, a development meant that a former F1 world champion would be going to the US to try his hand at NASCAR. Obviously we wanted to cover that because he’s got huge name recognition among F1 fans that form the bulk of crash.net‘s audience and who would want and expect to read about it (and from my point of view it was also a way of potentially growing the audience for the site’s NASCAR section.)

Trouble is, he wasn’t going into NASCAR Sprint Cup – the series we covered. He was going in two levels down (“Truck”), so suddenly we had to provide at least baseline coverage of that series to provide the same sort of context and background I was previously talking about developing. And then there’s a mid-series (“Nationwide”) which we thought we should cover just in case he tried that out while he was there (and indeed he did). So suddenly we were covering three NASCAR series rather than just one, and overarching all of that was the need for specific “pop-out” focus coverage of the F1 champion meta-story. It increased the NASCAR output by at least three-fold.

Which would still have been fine if it hadn’t coincided with the Indianapolis 500, America’s biggest motor racing event of the year. Where most motor race events consist of a few hours of practice on a Friday, an hour or two of qualifying on the Saturday, and the race itself on the Sunday, the Indy 500 was a completely different level: a full day of rookie orientation to cover, then seven days of practice, followed by an entire weekend of qualifying and then a full week of build-up before the race itself. Where a normal race weekend would consist of perhaps ten hours of track activity, the Indy 500 was scheduled to deliver nearly nine times that amount in under three weeks in a non-stop daily rotation.

Where NaNoWriMo is regarded as a Big Ask because it requires writers to commit to producing something like 1700 words every day for a month, suddenly the cumulative effect of all this context, character and scope creep meant that most days in May was requiring between 4000 and 6000 words of reporting on an average day of coverage (this blog post, which may well feel interminable to you, dear reader, is a relatively succinct and concise 2300 by contrast.) Even if you were just able to sit down at a keyboard and start typing, that’s a lot of work each and every day.

And the thing with reporting rather than fiction/creative writing is that you can’t sit there pummelling away at the keyboard producing everything out of your imagination. You have to know what you’re talking about and it has to be accurate, which means an awful lot of research work on top of the actual writing: finding the facts, sifting through them – which takes a lot of time.

The Indianapolis 500 qualification is a particular case in point: it has the most bizarre, unintelligible process I’ve ever seen, called “Bump Day” (it’s protected from a rational overhaul by the historical reverence Americans have for the Indy 500 as a whole, which celebrated its centennial this week.) I confess that coming into it, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t have to cover it last year, and looking back at other people’s reports it made absolutely no sense to me. I soon found out why: I tried researching it and couldn’t find any consistency in explanations among all the sources; even the official IndyCar.com guidance on it turned out to be inaccurate when it came to the actual day. It seems that there’s a certain amount of “making it up on the spur of the moment” that goes with it, and unless you actually sit through it all and follow virtually every moment it’s almost impossible to understand it fully, and if you don’t understand it then you certainly can’t explain it with any confidence or clarity to the people relying on your account in turn.

As a result, in the last few weeks, most of my time spent not writing has instead been catching up via streaming Internet radio stations, blogs and Twitter feeds covering the events that I’m writing about; I’ve also found some great podcasts which have been perfect in adding to my understanding and to the authenticity of what I produce, plus I’m receiving a ton of emails every day which are press releases from the various teams and venues involved which need going through for usable material. Just reading through the various driver and team PR quotes after a day’s activity looking for those one or two lines to bring a report to life – making a character live on the page, or having them provide a description of events from their point of view – can take an age, but is inevitably worth it when it pays off.

My writing has become a lot more informed and nuanced thanks to immersing myself in the culture of the IndyCar and NASCAR worlds, but it’s meant that for every hour I’ve spent writing I’ve spent almost two in background and prep work: I’ve taken up going off for two-hour walks on most days just so I can take my podcasts with me for a good listen. In the past I’d naively assumed that I was good enough that I could get by without this sort of hard graft, but now I can really see just how much it adds to the quality of the end result if you invest the time and effort to really know your subject. (Yes, experienced journalists will be rolling their eyes and doing “durrrr!” and not without good cause. All I can say is that everyone needs to learn the lesson themselves to really take it to heart.)

So if anyone’s been wondering where I’ve gone, why I hadn’t been tweeting or blogging or emailing as much as usual in the last month, that’s why – and I just hope the end effort over on crash.net justifies the time and effort that has gone into it.

Anyway, it’s all done now, and there’s a lot of writing been done over the last two weeks that I have to say – with all due humility – I’m immensely proud of, pieces that I can read back after just a few days or a week later and actually think: “Ooooh that’s good,” either because the original seed of an idea was a nice original twist or simply because the execution has lifted what in other places had seemed to be a rather dull, flat, uninteresting piece and made it something genuinely interesting. (If you want to check out any of this stuff, just go to the IndyCar, NASCAR and GP2 sections of crash.net and read from the archives.)

What this has all taught me is how much sheer hard work covering real events properly can actually be. By contrast with this sort of reporting work, fiction writing is positively a breeze. Small wonder that so many newspaper journalists, having spent years honing their craft, then go on to become such fabulous novelists and look so darn happy about it: it’s far easier than all that slogging away in the reporting trenches and pays better to boot.

I don’t pretend to be suddenly a world class journalist just because of a few weeks of hard work covering some motor races. But it’s certainly made me appreciate some things a lot more about what writers go through day in and day out to produce quality journalistic coverage of events.

It’s also made me appreciate my own abilities to pull this off, and I think I’m a better writer because of having had the chance to do this. Plus, at the end of the day, I still love the subject matter as much as I ever have. In fact, even more so having had the chance to properly immerse myself in it all.

At some point I’ll have to surface back in reality, but the Month of May Motorsport Madness has for me been quite magical – but I am certainly ready for a few days rest now!

I refer you to the icon that accompanies this post as to which way I’ll be voting on the matter. Those of a sensitive anti-AV disposition should look away now.

Here in London, the referendum is the only game in town for voters – there are no local or regional elections here this year – and so the pundits are expecting an all-time low turn out for any vote in the capital as a result. That in itself is a huge indictment of the state of our democracy: that so few people can be bothered to turn out on a vote on how elections themselves should work. Is it that people don’t care? Don’t think it’s important? Don’t understand it? Wilfully want to thumb their noses at politicians?

Personally I’ve always voted, in every single election that I’ve been eligible for. I regard it as a privilege, a right and a responsibility to do so. And especially after the last few months where we’ve seen people rising up through the Middle East against dictatorial regimes for their right to have their voice heard, our ability to vote should be resonating even strongly than usual: but sadly it appears that isn’t the case. We’re bored with having to make decisions for ourselves it seems, and apparently find it hard to understand things even when we are spoon-fed.

Often it’s been argued that people are disenchanted with democracy because they go to the polling station and get the same old tired options, or often no option at all because they live in an area that skews toward Conservative or Labour (or even Liberal Democrat in a few seats) and so it’s obvious who is going to win, their vote won’t matter either way, why should they bother turning up? And that certainly is one of the issues with First Past The Post (FPTP), which is why people campaigning for electoral reform had such great hopes that overhauling the system would allow people more choice and more ability to accurately express what they want from their political leaders.

Well, it turns out what if you give the country the chance to overhaul the system, they don’t want to. So I guess the overwhelming majority of people feel that FPTP does give them the kind of governance that they want and political representatives who do what they say. If you’re voting for FPTP today, then you’re voting for the status quo and you should henceforth refrain from criticising the parties, the MPs, the politicians and the political system for the rest of your time on Earth. You had your chance; you fumbled the ball. Game over.

A couple of years ago you would have thought political reform that gave voters more sensitive control over their leaders would have been a slam dunk, what with the expenses scandal and the general dissatisfaction with the state of the country in both an economic and political sense. So were did it all go wrong for the pro-AV camp?

For one thing it’s been a lamentable “Yes” campaign. It’s not been coherent, and if I hear another strained, over-baked analogy trying to explain the AV system this year I’ll simply scream. What, we’re too dumb these days to understand something unless it’s preceded by the words “It’s as if …” before an even more confusing illustration than the thing it is trying to explain?

And the pro-AV camp certainly blundered big time when they positioned the initial campaign as a way of “getting rid of useless MPs” … “make them work harder for you” – because then every local representative felt slighted by the insinuation and the association, and why should they then bust a gut campaigning with you to get AV introduced? And moreover, it was a slap in the face to everyone who voted last time: “look, you screwed up with who you elected last time, you dumb pleb, so here’s how we’re going to fix it for you” doesn’t win many friends among the voters, either.

Sadly, the biggest factor in this referendum has been the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government. People who criticise Nick Clegg for what has happened over the past year miss how much he needed to prove that coalition governments were possible and even preferable if he was to have had any chance of getting people to vote for a system more inclined to produce election results without a majority winner. If the Lib Dems had refused to go into coalition then the whole viability of a non-FPTP system would have been open for question; and if, having gone into coalition, the thing had broken down in fights and acrimony then the electorate would have been forgiven for thinking that such outcomes had to be avoided at all possible costs in future. And so Clegg has ended up here in May 2011 where for all his good intentions he had managed to wreck his own personal credibility, that of his party – and yes, even that of coalitions and alternative voting systems after all. The way to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

With everyone unsure what this whole AV thing actually meant, the ‘No’ camp always had the upper hand. When people are uncertain about anything, they’ll vote to stay where they are. It’s always easier to get people to vote against something than for something, which is why Britain’s only other national referendum – on EEC membership, in 1975 – cannily waited until we were in the EEC and then asked if we should leave: 67% voted to stay where we were. If the vote had been taken in 1971 before we joined, then I’m quite convinced a similar 67% would have voted not to join at all.

Voters will always take the “better the devil you know” line unless the current devil is really, really bad. And no one can really argue that FPTP is catastrophically bad, because we’ve seen with our own eyes for nearly two hundred years that it actually does a pretty acceptable job. It’s not perfect, perhaps, and it has its faults – but we know those faults, and familiarity breeds a cosy acceptance after so many years, so we’re happy now to muddle along with it.

Whereas AV would be a step in the unknown, and “No” campaigners can project into that black “unknown” void any sort of primal terror they want, and it seems no one can disprove it because it’s new and unknown. Hence the blatant lies about “It’ll cost £250m and wreck the economy!” or “It’ll let the BNP/al-Qaeda/your terrorist group of choice in!” or simply “It’s the end of thousands of years of democracy as we know it!” and people might not necessarily believe it, but it’ll still leave the uncertainty in their minds and so they’ll default to their safe, happy place when it comes to voting in today’s referendum so that they’ll stick with the current system.

It’s amazing how little people seem able to see through the “fear of the unknown” argument. Londoners who accepted and understood AV quite happily as the system for choosing their Mayor suddenly seem to regard it as an unknown hostile alien entity. Millions of people who vote in Big Brother, X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent quite happily seem convinced that they’ll never understand exactly the same system when applied to politics. It’s amazing how politicians and the media have persuaded huge swathes of the electorate how cretinous they are, that we believe a system the likes of which works quite happily in Australia and New Zealand (actually, those are much more complicated systems as it happens) are beyond the understanding of us mere Brits. What new level of national self-loathing have we reached to bring us to this?

Yes, AV might end up letting parties such as the BNP get representation in local councils – but of course, so did FPTP, and civilisation didn’t fall. Moreover, people should be able to vote for parties they want and not get shut out of having their views represented simply because there’s a bullying majority (and sometimes a majority of no more than 30% of the electorate) who feel that such views aren’t decent and shouldn’t be heard. That sort of suppression of people’s views and beliefs is fundamentally undemocratic and is one of the reasons why FPTP fails in my mind. Believing in democracy means believing that the BNP should have a fair crack of getting elected if their voting support warrants it, for as long as the BNP remains a legal political party in this country. You might not like their ideology (and I most certainly don’t) but democracy is about letting views that you disagree with, often passionately so, get a fair airing and a fair chance at the polling station. It’s up to those of us who disagree with such parties to marshal our arguments against them and make sure they don’t succeed, not to rely on a stacked electoral system to do our job for us.

AV isn’t the perfect Holy Grail version of proportional representation that campaigners have wanted and called for over the years. It was a “don’t scare the horses” compromise that the Liberal Democrats could get their Conservative coalition partners to agree to, and more importantly one they thought they could explain to the UK without getting everyone frightened about the end of the world as we know it. But at least AV would have started the momentum and proved there were options and alternatives and it would have been possible to carry on the debate: a “No” vote today shuts the door on the issue for a generation, just as the EEC referendum is seem as the final word on membership of the EU nearly 40 years on.

It turns out the reformers were over-estimating us after all, and that people will shy away from even the mildest unknown and prefer to stick with the flawed. As someone who genuinely believes in democracy and the will of the people, I can’t really argue with the outcome – it’s the will of the people, expressed in a fair and open vote, and that’s all I ever ask for. I’m just sad today that fear of the unknown should drown out the hope for better, and that people in the UK too often settle for second best and what they have rather than working, striving and hoping for more and better. If anyone wants to understand the fundamental difference between UK and US politicians, it is this: that in the US, they actually believe in the American Dream and Manifest Destiny and that things will be better tomorrow that they are today; whereas here, we are perpetually frightened of letting yesterday slip away because tomorrow will surely be worse. It must be so: it says so in the Daily Mail.

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why?

I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

- Robert Kennedy

In the meantime, I’m off to the polling station to vote. As there are only two options, it’s not a vote that would itself be changed by a switch from FPTP to AV so I can’t really cry foul. But I’ll be sticking with my pro-electoral reform beliefs that I’ve held for over twenty years, no matter how doomed they are, because even if the end result is indeed overwhelmingly for the status quo it still matters that we show how many millions of people aren’t satisfied with that. The more “Yes” voters who turn out today the more chance there is that someday the issue will be revisited and tackled properly. So even if it’s a lost cause in 2011, it still matters that people register their thoughts and beliefs today so that they may be recorded into history and used by posterity accordingly.

Go on. Just go out there and vote. Whichever way you vote and however you feel about the issue. Because either way, it really is too damn important to just sit there on your backside again.

Her most famous character, Sarah Jane Smith, was not the first Doctor Who companion that I remember – that would have been Jo Grant, and I remember how upset my six-year-old self was when Jo departed the series (to live in Wales! With an environmentalist nut! How can this be allowed to happen?!) Imagine how bad it was the following year when “my” Doctor, Jon Pertwee, also left – dying (to all intents and purposes) on the laboratory floor tended to by Sarah Jane and the Brigadier. When Sarah Jane cried – “A tear, Sarah Jane? No, no, don’t cry…” – I cried with her, and that’s the sort of bonding experience a child has with a character and an actress that is never broken.

After Pertwee left, I rejected the “new” Doctor on principle and stopped watching soon after (lured away to the dark side of ITV by Space: 1999). But that had never happened the previous year with the changeover of companions, and that’s because as sad as I was to see Jo depart, it was impossible not to be instantly won over by Sarah Jane. That was the sort of effect that Elisabeth Sladen seemed to have on absolutely everyone.

I wasn’t watching the show when eventually it was Sarah Jane’s time to leave (in many ways, I think my sub-conscious refuses to believe she actually ever did leave), but I watched and really liked the attempted spin-off K9 and Company in which Elisabeth Sladen was quite the best thing and totally the star – I thought at the time that it was such a shame her one shot at solo success seemed to have come to nothing … It was lovely to see her reunited with Pertwee one more time in the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, where she gamely threw herself down a slight incline on a Welsh hillside for old times sake in order to contribute one last “cliffhanger” to the show. Of all the companions that the Doctor ever had on those classic years, she was the one everyone remembered, and everyone liked.

If there had been no more to Sarah Jane’s story, and Elisabeth Sladen had stepped away from the limelight from then on, then Tuesday’s news would have been a surprise, and rather sad for nostalgic reasons to those of us with 35-year-old memories of her – but it wouldn’t have been as deeply shattering as it actually was. And that’s because Sarah Jane’s – and Lis Sladen’s – finest hours were yet to come.

When Doctor Who was revived in 2005 after 16 years of cancellation, showrunner Russell T Davies was careful to keep away all those accumulated years of show mythology away from the screen, lest the show choke to death on its own history and alienate the new generation of fans it needed win over to succeed. Other than the Daleks, the Tardis and the Doctor himself, this was to be a completely new show. But even Davies couldn’t resist the allure of Sarah Jane, and in the new show’s second season he brought back the character (along with K9) for an episode called School Reunion which is still one of the best stories they’ve done.

The best special effect in that episode was Lis Sladen herself, who had somehow defied time and looked not exactly the same as she had in 1974 … but instead, somehow better and more beautiful than ever. How could you not look at her, talk with her and spend time with her and not decide that what the world really needed more than anything else right now was a full-on series of Sarah Jane Adventures? And so Sarah Jane became the Doctor figure to her own group of young companions, and Elisabeth Sladen was shown to be what we the fans had known all along: a true star in her own right, the greatest of all the companions, and the rarest of them – the companion who could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Time Lord himself as an equal. She had a cool car, sonic lipstick, a great leather jacket, could outpace her young co-stars in a full-on run down the street – the woman was a marvel. Not just for her age, but for someone half her age and then some.

In many ways, The Sarah Jane Adventures (SJA) has been closer to the spirit of the original classic Who than the newly regenerated Doctor Who series that needed to be bigger, bolder, deeper, more action, more FX than ever before. I never hesitated to recommend SJA to anyone and everyone, and never saw it as “just a kids show” any more than I had the original classic Who show: with its focus on Earth-bound adventures, SJA was very like Pertwee’s UNIT era, and there was a genuine sense of fun, enjoyment and lightness to the show which, one suspects, started at the centre with the star herself. Not that it was afraid to go to deeper and darker places itself when it needed to – one of the final season stories, about Sarah Jane’s adopted son Luke leaving home, touched some very complex and disturbing emotions for children and adults alike of abandonment and the fear of moving on, growing old, no longer being needed.

The show also allowed the show to reconnect with its past in some lovely moments: Nicholas Courtney’s last screen appearance as the Brigadier before his own death earlier this year (and as one piece of small, cold comfort, at least he’s not here for this week’s news – it would have broken his heart if he had been); David Tennant’s last screen performance as the Doctor (it was filmed after he had officially regenerated in the main series); and in the final season, not only Matt Smith popping up to continue the tradition, but the return of Katy Manning as Jo Grant after nearly forty years. To see Sarah Jane and Jo finally get to meet, talk, share notes on their lives and on the Doctor was an extraordinary moment of closure for any long time fan.

And it’s also the clue that shows how and why Sarah Jane – and Lis Sladen – is so very special to the history of the show and to the hearts of all long-time fans. The Doctor Who companion is always meant to be be the point of audience identification, the one through whose eyes we see the extraordinary character of the Doctor and his adventures. Thanks to her unique association with the series and her unswerving love and cheerleading for the show throughout, Lis Sladen was the ultimate success in achieving that.

My favourite moment of SJA is a quiet side moment, when Sarah Jane is in the middle of a typical hyperactive adventure which has taken her on board an orbiting alien spaceship. She suddenly looks out of a window – we see her face from the other side, with the glass overlaying a lovely reflection of the planet Earth over her face. Lis Sladen’s look at this moment is wonderful – literally, full of wonder – and quite beautifully perfect. “I never thought I would see that again,” she says to herself, the character having felt that her space travelling days ended with the Doctor – just as fans had thought that it had all come to and end in 1989. But they hadn’t, and it was a shared moment between character, actress and fans that showed that sometimes dreams can come true and good things do happen.

Sarah Jane Smith cried with us when Pertwee left; she let rip at the Doctor years later for dropping her like a stone at the end of The Hand of Fear. She showed how being touched by travelling with the Doctor changes you, how life is never the same afterwards, and how going back to “ordinary” just isn’t an option. Not everyone gets to go on to save the world (a lot) as Sarah Jane did, but a touching coda to the Matt Smith/Katy Manning story in SJA gave name checks to the Doctor’s other Earth-bound companions going on to do extraordinary things, such as Tegan fighting for aboriginal rights, showing the profound effect of the Doctor’s influence on others in the show’s universe.

But it’s not just in fiction that Doctor Who has this power. It’s also touched and transformed the lives of many people in real life too: Russell T Davis and Steven Moffat might very well not have been inspired to be writers without the show seizing their imagination as children and showing them what was possible; David Tennant might never have been seized by the desire to act if not for having a childhood dream of being the Doctor himself one day. Countless other fans have grown up to be writers, novelists, magazine editors and even scientists because of the show. This is true for all of those of us who have been genuinely touched by the show and its characters and all the actors and production staff who have made it over the years. Once you’ve immersed yourself in the world of the Doctor, somehow reality isn’t quite the same again: ordinary just isn’t good enough, and has to be made better. It’s the sort of real life inspiration that moves mountains and changes worlds.

All this was just as true for Elisabeth Sladen: her life was forever changed by her years travelling in the Tardis, even if it had started off as just another acting job. She didn’t mind one bit how the show shaped and changed her, but instead embraced it and ran with it and was forever the show’s biggest fan, loving Doctor Who old and new – and the show loved her in return.

And so did we.

After my internet connection was restored I had a terrific weekend – ironically by being out of the house and offline for most of it. But ironically, the Saturday outing was a direct result of having my internet back in the first place, as I was able to spy an invitation from my former COI colleague Sebastian Crump asking if anyone was interested in tagging along to Kew Gardens at the weekend. Already signed up was his lovely wife Jessica, and Ann Kempster of GCN who I know quite well from our online dialogues but had never had a chance to properly meet.

Seb and Ann are keen photographers, and I like taking pictures as well although sometimes I get out of the habit and need to be nudged back into the groove. A visit to Kew Gardens was just such a nudge and I was keen to take advantage of it and try my hand at taking a whole load of photos.

I’m very pleased with the results; they’re posted over at Flickr (more are being added as I get around to them) and a few of them are included in this post to whet your appetite and hopefully lure you over to check out more of them.

Thanks to Seb for the invite, and to him and Ann for the inspiration – seeing them at work showed me true dedication to the photographic cause and got me working away as well, even I managed only half the haul that Ann did. And thanks also to Jess for being such great company, who indulged us and put up us clowning around with our cameras!

Ann’s photos put mine to shame – check them out in her sets in her Flickr photostream – and I’m sure Seb’s will be too when he catches up, but he works on a 7-week turnaround time for new material!