The problem is, to paraphrase William Goldman, no one has a clue what works until the programme gets made. To remind myself of this I find it sort of therapeutic to think of successful TV programmes of the past and list the reasons why they could never possibly work:

THE OFFICE. No one wants to come home from a boring office job and watch other people do boring office jobs on television. It won’t work.

FRASIER. The two main characters are a pompous intellectual psychiatrist and his brother, who is also a pompous intellectual psychiatrist. There is no conflict. Therefore it won’t work.

THE WEST WING. It’s people talking far too quickly about details of the US legislative process. It is impossible to follow. It won’t work.

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS. It is about a sponge. It won’t work.

If anyone raised those objections at the time, they’ve shut up about them now. A few years ago, I was on a train and overheard a conversation between two electricians about a TV drama they were working on. The drama was about a policeman who is hit by a car and wakes up in 1973, not knowing whether he is dreaming or not. I thought it was pretty much the stupidest idea I had ever heard.

Luckily the producer I’ve been developing the idea with was considerably better prepared and came out with a string of reasons why our show could be funny, unusual, yet still relevant to a mainstream audience. I chipped in a couple of times, we discussed some of the commissioner’s concerns about the tone of the programme, and by the end of the meeting we had a script commission.

Brilliant. It feels like a great achievement, and I have to remind myself that despite all the weeks of meetings, research and drafting pitch documents, I still haven’t written a single word of the script. Only when that’s done will we really know whether the idea is any good or not.

High on adrenaline, I got back on the train to Manchester, opened my writing pad and was asleep by Watford.

So the next stage is for me and the producer I’ve been working with to go into the exec’s office and pitch the show. We need to sell the idea, explain how it’ll work and show what a broad appeal it could have.

Problem is, I’ve tried pitching before and I’m rubbish at it. I get scared. I’m like one of those people on Dragons’ Den who get two sentences in, forget their words, stand quietly for a bit and then cry. And that probably won’t get us our script commission.

But we’ll have a go anyway. I’ll try to make Project X sound like a sure-fire winner while being refreshingly different from any show that has gone before. I’ll try to make it sound like a mixture of all the best and most successful shows of the last few years – a sort of Shameless meets The IT Crowd crossed with Lazytown with its own slant that makes it completely different to any of them. I’ll be dynamic and enthusiastic. And I’ll be talking through my hat the entire time. (That is, unless the executive in question is reading this, in which case it really is a guaranteed sure-fire hit, honest).

I’ll let you know what happens…

Hello. My name is Daniel. Hello. I’ve been working as a full-time writer for four years, writing sitcoms and children’s programmes, and last year I wrote my first series I'm With Stupid for BBC3.

It can be a tedious and frustrating process writing TV scripts and through this blog I hope to share some of that tedium and frustration with you. It can also be massively fun and rewarding, which I won’t mention.

So what am I working on at the moment? I’ve just finished putting together a treatment for a new sitcom, and it’s in a BBC executive’s inbox at this very second. I’m hoping she might commission a script. For now I will call the treatment Project X, not because it is a remake of the 1987 drama about Matthew Broderick’s love for a monkey, but because I don’t want to go into loads of detail about it only to have it rejected and to look like a div.

In the spirit of Abi’s cliffhangers, I’ll let you know what happens. If Project X gets thumbs-upped I’ll keep some sort of record of how the writing progresses. If they chuck it out then I suppose I’ll write about what I’m watching on daytime TV.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Hello.