TV musicals? What TV musicals?

These illnesses always go on just slightly longer than a man can endure don't they? Mine is following an almost identical pattern to Nathan's, who now seems better, so I'm hoping it will pass through my system soon enough. The high levels of stress continue, however. I drove to Oxford yesterday for a quiz and spent most of the night experiencing adrenaline bolts shooting through my upper chest, which is just ludicrous. I could, of course, go to see my GP, but the curse of the freelancer is that I'll simply be told I need to take some time off work and, of course, if I do that, my stress levels will rise further, largely because I won't be getting paid to do anything! It's all very dull. I wish I had the energy to knuckle down at the start of a day and just plough through. Maybe tomorrow...

There's nothing else to say for today. I heard from a TV exec this afternoon who tells me that no one wants to put any musical dramas on telly any more. There's a weird, and (in my view) somewhat arrogant, belief that there's not an audience for them. Largely, one assumes because the execs are all too cool for school. What upsets me is that you can only really say there's no audience for a specific genre of telly drama if there have been lots of examples of it which have flopped. Because musical dramas aren't actually put on the telly, no one knows if there would be an audience for them. My message to any TV commissioners reading this: Take a punt! But whatever you do, don't waste time on cynical projects where you're producing dramas you THINK might appeal to a specific demographic, or an audience you feel you ought to be trying to attract. Don't tell your writers they have to justify people bursting into song by using dream sequences. People sing in musicals. Get over it. Just let someone write something from the heart and it'll find its audience soon enough.