Reports I’m getting from people better placed than myself to know are that development money for new tv projects is hard to come by. Which might explain why, despite the favourable response to my drug worker drama The Sharp End, I haven’t had a bite as a result.

Not that I was expecting things to be so straightforward. More realistically, people who liked my writing on that pilot script might want to talk to me about writing projects of their own. Which tentatively started to happen at one point, with a drama series set in a world that had parallels to the one I was writing about, but came to nothing.

Still, I’m moving forward with The Sharp End anyway. Started to do a rewrite yesterday, based partly on wise feedback from Philip Palmer, some of which I haven’t acted on until now, with a view to sending it out to a dozen or more production companies in the New Year. Again, the expectation is more that it’ll serve as a door opener than anything.

There’s also the multimedia project I’m developing. And I had a breakthrough with that when I caught up with a friend who is a director of a Soho post-production business. One missing piece of the jigsaw was what motivation I could offer to a games company to go with our untested concept and not one they’d developed in-house. I now have a very sensible answer to that question, albeit one that requires the investment of a chunk of money neither I nor my partner in this venture have at our disposal. But that’s what we were expecting, and is why we’ve set up as co-directors of a limited company, so that we offer a chunk of same to the investors we’ll be speaking to.

Somewhere, the tv future and multimedia one converge. In not many years time, households and individuals will utilise portals through which they access both that which is currently called television, along with games and the internet. Which is one reason why tv development money is scarce: noone is sure what the future holds, though some bigger players such as the BBC can shape it purely through the choices they make about access to their archives. But only to an extent: even though the Christmas Dr Who is available at the BBC website, a sizeable number of people prefer illegal downloads because they don’t like the BBC’s iPlayer interface.

At the moment, I know about this stuff at a distance, but not as a consumer. And that’s something that needs to change. With that in mind, I’m planning to get an iPhone, to engage with what’s happening in digital media as it progresses, and find out at first hand the highs and lows of test piloting the future. There’s just the small matter of my phone contract not being up for renewal until July, but having been a good Orange customer for some years, I’m hoping that a bit of persuasion will see me tricked out before then.

With the iPhone, this bizarre world of apps that I’m hearing about, and have seen thanks to a few friends who own one, and their chirruping presence at seemingly every coffee shop I visited in Melbourne two months back, will become a reality. And it’s a reality I need to embrace: the multimedia project I’m co-devising is designed for just such a world, and I’m going to feel a bit of a fake turning up to meetings without being able to demonstrate on my own handheld gizmo. That role falls to my partner at this point, and both of us need to get tooled-up.

Fingers crossed, at least one of those meetings with a potential investor in the multimedia project will happen in the next few weeks. It’s a distinct possibility anyway, and means more putting of noses to grindstones, and shoulders to the wall, but you know what? I don’t mind. I’m long enough in the tooth to have picked up that success in this business is not just about the quality of what you do creatively, but your ability to treat it as if it really can make some money for people. Otherwise, it’s a hobby, and for that I have swimming pools and CDs to keep me occupied.