Before Dreaming Whilst Black was a BAFTA winner, it was an idea Adjani Salmon had no reasonable basis for believing in. He decided to make it anyway, then spent years finding out what that decision would actually require of him.

In episode four, he talks with Jazz Lintott about the kind of ambition that looks like delusion from the outside and functions like a strategy from the inside. He is unsentimental about the bill. The sleep, the money, and the relationships that quietly paid for the thing other people later described as an overnight success.

He is equally generous with the craft. How a writer learns to see a script's problems by putting the whole thing up on a wall and standing back from it, and why the safest moment to make something bad is early, while nobody is paying attention yet.