Dear Australian television industry,

"Innovative" means new and interesting and unique. It doesn't mean "based on a show we bought from overseas". So when you say "we're looking for bold and innovative ideas", I think perhaps what you mean is "We're looking for rehashed ideas that have worked somewhere else".

I understand it's a difficult distinction, but I thought I'd tell you in case you found out through someone else. That might be embarrassing.

Any other questions, give me a call.

I'm just sitting around writing.

Yesterday, I donated blood. I know I've said it before, but donating blood is a truly rewarding experience (self-satisfaction is right up there, free milkshakes, free food, trashy reading material, and you save three lives!). For those of us who have time (rather than money) it's the closest we'll come to philanthropy.

Anyway, so I turn up and I get talking to this nurse.

NURSE: So what are you working on then?

SELF SATISFIED BLOOD DONATING PHILANTHROPIST: We're developing a kids' TV show at the moment. [YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I LOVE SAYING THIS BTW]

NURSE: Oh great. Kids' TV is great.

SSBDP: You think so?

NURSE: Oh yes, when I was a kid, I used to love....

.... Now, at this point, the person usually says: Degrassi Junior High, Inspector Gadget, Punky Brewster or (if they're five years younger than I am) You Can't Do That On Television or Round The Twist...

NURSE: a British show, you might not have heard of it, it was called Press Gang.

SSBDP: Might not have heard of it? That is still among my top ten favourite shows ever made!

NURSE: Oh really? Yeah. I loved it so much that I made my mum ring up the ABC and they gave her the number of the BBC and so she called the BBC and I sent them a fan letter.

SSBDP: *Respectful silence*

NURSE: It was great actually, they sent me a signed photograph of the whole cast and I got one each from Lynda and Spike. Remember them?

REMEMBER THEM? I have the entire series on DVD and I have a backup series for when someone's borrowing the boxed set with the extras DVD!

REMEMBER THEM? I studied them! YOU HAVE A SIGNED PHOTO OF THE WHOLE CAST? YOU HAVE AN INDIVIDUAL PORTRAIT OF LYNDA AND SPIKE WITH SIGNATURES????

It was all I could do not to send my blood pressure so high with excitement that I couldn't donate.

Honestly, one of the biggest dilemmas of my TV watching teenagehood was who I was in love with more: Lynda or Spike? I still can't decide.

The nurse's favourite episode was the one where she blamed herself for the suicide and the double episode with the clown. Both classic episodes and favoured among fans (myself included) although I really enjoyed the episode where Lynda had the hiccups and the one where Colin crashed a funeral dressed as a rabbit. Each to their own.

Anyway, there's another reason to donate blood. I wonder if brain surgeons go in and she says "Oh I love brain surgery. What's your favourite bit of the brain? I think mine's the frontal lobe".

I wonder if blood is more useful if it's pleased.

PS to donate blood, go to www.donateblood.com.au

Today, having returned my heart monitor to the crippled hospital system from whence it came, I am like a new woman. Less bionic, for starters.

Being sick, even if only melodramatically and without reason, makes you think about being healthy and climbing mountains on the weekend and drinking carrot juice and doing yoga that makes you barely break a sweat into your crisp white yoga outfit while eating yoghurt and almonds and wearing moisturising cream that makes your skin glow and sharing a joke with someone just off camera who has just said something amusing yet flattering. You know, like on the low fat margarine posters on bus stops.

You watch, it's all going to be different now. Either that, or I'm going to succumb to The Guilt and become a slave again to the written word (and the internet) (and Twinings).

Did you watch The Librarians on the ABC last night? Did you press pause over my name in the credits?

No? Just me then?

Carry on.

Now that Standing There Productions is in the business of developing children's television scripts and trying to turn them into children's television SHOWS, I have been studiously watching:

Degrassi Junior High
Round The Twist
Press Gang
and whatever else I can find on the telly when I'm pottering around doing something else.

Hence I was idly wondering today about the Degrassi legacy. How long did they milk that show for? How many different Degrassi schools were there? How many actors found their careers revived after the first Degrassi in order to launch the next generation?

The answer to most of those questions is: heaps.

Joey Jeremiah, the pipsqueak bully with the skateboard from Degrassi Junior High, comes back as AN ADULT in Degrassi The Next Generation. Check him out here and at his very Joey-friendly website (Joey would surely approve of "patmeup.com") here. Apparently, Adult Joey has an on-again, off-again relationship with Adult Caitlin. Also starring in Degrassi Next Generation are Snake and Spike, who are (I do believe) married. Degrassi: Next Generation is definitely my next DVD purchase, and it's even work related!

What seems disappointing, from looking at the photographs of Degrassi: Next Generation, is that it LOOKS like other TV shows. Everyone's a hottie. Nobody's dowdy or fat or squinty or pimply. Nobody hunches. Nobody even has outrageous hair, worn with aplomb in the original series by Spike, the likes of whom I had never seen roaming my school, but I certainly wouldn't have minded if she did. It's a shame everybody looks the same in Next Generation, since the utopia of Degrassi really was a lovely place to imagine. Where everyone was normal, with the possible exception of the "hot" girl, Stephanie, who was (we all knew deep down) a bit of a tool.

Now, she's a jazz musician. Check it.

Anyway, look, obviously today is a day for thinking about important things like Degrassi, because the news itself is too ludicrous for words. Hence I am interested only in Degrassi, and the following: Motorola has apparently invented battery chargers for mobile phones that are run by... guess what... riding a bicycle. Yes here it is. You ride your bike around and your phone is charged. Designed for African farmers apparently, although it doesn't explicitly rule out idiots who forget to take their mobile chargers with them to work.

Just a few words of warning. If someone comes to your house and asks with kind eyes whether they can use your house as a filming location, tell them the house is chock full of asbestos, cough thickly, and slam the door.

Location Managers on films are always gorgeous, divine, lovely people. They're the sort of people you see in kids' story books, picking potatoes in the fields and helping children into brightly coloured gumboots so they can jump into puddles and enjoy the simple joys of splashing. If location managers want to film something in your house, or your front garden, they will do anything. They will learn your birthday, your mother's name, the number of points by which your team won on the weekend. They will get your kids tickets to the movies. They will offer to pay you, to put you up in a "flash hotel". They will peer deep into your eyes with their gorgeous open faces, faces that speak of kindness and hot chocolate by the fire, faces that indicate that it doesn't matter what your answer is, they will always share a deep understanding with you, about the important things in life.

Close. The. Door. Do not be fooled. Look away! LOOK AWAY, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS SACRED.

You see, on Friday, we filmed in my house. Us. Standing There Productions. We used my house as a location.

For all intents and purposes, I was the location manager. I was the one who convinced me it would be a good idea. I was the one who looked deep into my own eyes and shared a moment with myself. What could possibly be slightly annoying or inconvenient about using my own house to film in? After all, the filming schedule is only four hours, it will hardly take ANY time, and it requires NO SET UP.

Well, I wish I could post a photograph here of the dire state of affairs in what used to be my home office, but I can't find my camera. I can't find anything, except several hundred kilometres of gaffa tape, half a dozen discarded light bulbs, multicoloured gells and cords and spots on the wall to mark eye-lines (one of which is fashioned from an old birthday card) and an assortment of props. There is a pair of waterproof pants, too, which I do believe belong to our cinematographer, but which were not necessary while filming inside, so they have been discarded, thoughtfully, on the work desk. That's right next to the lamp from my bedroom which has been removed from there and installed here instead, with a trillion watt globe in it such that turning it on will instantly blind you, whereupon you will trip over the pile of old scripts we removed from within shot on set and stored, in a large wonky pile, on the floor.

I am also, for all intents and purposes, the Standing There Productions OH&S officer. Obviously, I'm fired.

But as you can see, I brought this on myself. YOU can avoid it.

When I was helping to write the coffee table book "20 Years Of Neighbours" (no, really), I discovered something mildly astonishing. From memory, it goes like this: if you want to buy a house in Pin Oak Court in Vermont South (where Neighbours is shot), you have to sign a contract with Grundies. Among other things, the contract specifies that you will notify them of any changes to the physical appearance of your property. There was a famous time when one of the residents in Pin Oak Court wanted to buy a new letterbox. What happened on Neighbours that week? Well, Susan Kennedy went out and bought a new letterbox, didn't she.

Of course, those guys are paid a fee. I'm not. Mind you, I don't have to answer the door to giggling groups of Neighbours fans asking if Harold is home, or British backpackers shagging in the backyard.

Don't do it, peeps. Unless there's a chance you can get in on the film set catering. In which case: open the throttle.

PS. Check out this hilarious article, as if you needed any more convincing.

PPS. When I was a kid, I thought "for all intents and purposes" was "for all intense and purposes", so I am never one hundred percent confident using the phrase. I also thought there was a story book called "Alison Wonderland", about Mr and Mrs Wonderland's little girl, Alice. Just saying. Hope I got it right this time.

I know it's Garfield's line, but I hate Mondays.

It doesn't matter how organised, restful or enjoyable my weekend was. It also doesn't matter if I had a dreadful weekend and I'm looking forward to starting afresh. I could have all the best intentions in the world: I will still be ninety percent less efficient on a Monday.

By about midday, usually I have successfully managed to have a cup of coffee and sometimes I can claim to have "researched" headlines like "drunken mooning goes horribly wrong", but there are only so many "idiot sets fire to house after lighting fart" stories that can genuinely provide inspiration for creative projects.

Hopefully, things like that will make it into a play or film at some point, but it does seem kind of unlikely to make it into a children's TV series, which is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment.

Perhaps I need to watch kids' TV all day on Monday. It might be more productive, and it will probably help with my somewhat remedial mathematics skills.

But, to be fair to myself, I do get more admin done on a Monday. If it weren't for Mondays I would probably never get back to anyone, never hand in anything on time, and never pay any bills.

Sometimes I think about writers like Bryce Courtney, who gets up half an hour before he goes to bed and splits the atom before breakfast and so on. My favourite all time literary couple, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, don't have the internet at home.

I'm sure there is something deeply suspect about all these people - possibly they are the kind of people who animals instinctively mistrust - but I am yet to see any proof of it.

This gives me hope and simultaneously robs me of geniune satisfaction. Which is only because it's a Monday and I hate Mondays/enjoy lasagne/have a love-hate relationship with the man who feeds me etc. Garfield is such a grump.

Anybody who has heard my ringtone knows the depth of my obsession with the '90s TV show, Press Gang.

Well, guess what, Press Gang nerds? There's talk of a relaunch!

Oh, heady days.