Coming soon to a screen near you - my life story

I was given a new diary this year, inscribed with the message, "If Alan Clark can do it, you can do it!"

If this means that I could write a diary which will one day be worth televising, I certainly agree, as my private life is as full of lust and ambition, of marital unworthiness and secret snobbish disappointment as Mr Clark's ever was. Well, it certainly will be as soon as I have written it all up in my diary.

And my diary will prove more attractive to TV companies than Alan Clark's diary for the simple reason that I have decided to write it in TV-script form. None of those slabs of introverted monologue - mine will be nothing but dialogue and shooting directions!

Let me give you an example of how I have started work on this project.

1 JANUARY

Bedroom interior. Darkness before dawn. Man and woman in bed. It is Mr and Mrs Kington.

Mrs: Where were you last night?

Mr: I was with you.

Mrs: No, you weren't.

Mr: Then I was with Lady Thatcher.

Mrs: No, you weren't. You don't even know her.

Mr: Oh. Then where the hell was I?

Mrs: I don't know. That's why I asked you.

Mr: What date was it last night?

Mrs: It was New Year's Eve! Hogmanay! We were invited to Tim and Morag's together! You never turned up! I was so humiliated!

Mr: My darling, I am so very, very, very sorry... (Etc etc etc. See almost anywhere in my 2003 diary for usual continuation of this touching reconciliation scene.)

Cut to mid-morning. Front doorbell rings.

Mr: I'll get it!

He opens the door. There stands a woman in postal uniform, holding a parcel.

Mr: Hello! Hello!

Woman: Hello.

Mr: My, but you're a vision of loveliness! You've got that sort of subterranean sexiness that a woman sometimes possesses without even being aware of it! You are an aftershave called Desire! You've got everything a man could want!

Woman: That's nice. I've also got a parcel for you. Could you sign here, please, Mr Kington?

Mr: There you go... Incidentally, we didn't spend New Year's Eve together, did we?

Woman: No. I'm sure I would have remembered it if we had.

Mr: Well, if you're free next New Year's Eve - oops! Here comes the wife! You'd better go.

She goes. Enter Mrs Kington.

Mrs: Who was that?

Mr: Er - she was a Jehovah's Witness. I sent her packing.

Mrs: She left a parcel behind, I see.

Mr: Yes. I think she liked me.

We move on to lunchtime. Mr and Mrs Kington are sitting together over a bowl of soup.

Mrs: Is this bowl of soup yours or mine?

Mr: You're absolutely right. I'll get the other bowl of soup.

Mrs: Have you remembered yet where you were last night?

Mr: Wherever it was, I don't want to go back there again. I seem to remember that there was a fitted kitchen there. People who have fitted kitchens also have off-the-peg prejudices, second-hand ideas taken from the Daily Mail and emotions copied from TV soaps.

Mrs: Has anyone ever told you that you are a snob?

Mr: I would be horrified to be told otherwise.

Mrs: How's the hangover, by the way?

Mr: I am still suffering. Unfortunately, by the time my hangover wears off, it is time to start drinking again. It is years since I last knew what it was like to be sober, without a hangover.

Mrs: Has anyone ever told you that you talk rather like a character rejected from a Noël Coward play?

Mr: No, but I shall put the thought in my diary anyway. After all, I cannot have all the best lines...

Well, there you go. And that was just halfway through day one. If anyone in TV wants a cut-price Alan Clark-type diary, already set up in shooting-script form, they know where to come