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The Script Factory TV FORUM: Soap Dish
Airing your dirty laundry in public is what soaps are all about after all
In April 2007 The Script Factory hosted TV FORUM, a very special two-day event totally dedicated to writing for television at The Soho Theatre, London.
As part of this we were delighted to bring together three of the UK’s top soap writers; Rob Gittins, Bill Lyons and Tony McHale. Together their CVs include episodes of Emmerdale, Eastenders and Crossroads as well as long-running serials from Casualty and Holby City to Heartbeat. Here, in conversation with Yvonne Grace, herself an experienced soap script editor and producer they explain the process of team writing, creating characters and audience will want to return to week after week and the unique pressures and demands of developing your own voice and stretching your own creativity within the confines of a story world already known and loved by millions.
Yvonne Grace
Tony McHale, Bill Lyons and Rob Gittins have an enormous wealth of experience in writing, directing and producing on shows like Casualty, Eastenders, Heartbeat, Holby City. Working on television drama is a specific skill and the best of fun, but it can also be frustrating. As a writer on a television series you not only have to be creative but be so under huge deadline restrictions and that can be quite a challenge.
Tony, do you think it takes a certain writer to work on soaps?
Tony McHale
I’ve talked and lectured on screenwriting virtually all over the world, and the idea that all television writers really want to write movies is absolutely right. I know that Rob has made a few and I have one in development, although I’ve never had one made. Writing a feature is the thing that you always want to do. But in the process of doing that, working on television has sometimes become looked on as a second-rate job, where as working on television, and doing long stints on Eastenders, Casualty, Holby City and The Bill, gave me an absolutely fantastic grounding for writing for the screen. For one, you have deadlines, which brings a reality about your work; you have to deliver, and if you don’t deliver some other person will deliver and you will be off. You have to make your episodes better than anyone else’s because you’re the one that wants the next commission. This means in many ways you have to try to be more creative within the parameters of what is given to you. If you have a film, you can start from a blank page. In many ways it’s easier when you create your own characters, create your own scene and locations rather than having to work within the context of a show which has parameters, characters and storylines that you have to pick up on. For me, that is actually one of the benefits of soap writing as it almost drives you to be creative in ways that you may never have thought of were you’re writing your own screenplay.
YG
Bill, regarding the collaborative process: writing in itself is a solitary experience, but writing in anything that’s long running, is by its very nature collaborative. How does that suit you as a writer, and do you think it takes a certain type of person to do it?
Bill Lyons
I’m okay with the collaborative process because I shout a lot and always get my own way.
I was interested in something Tony said, and I’ll get back to collaboration later, if I may. Tony was talking about the difference between screenwriting and writing for soaps. They are not mutually exclusive anyway but they are different. The interesting thing for me about soaps, which Tony touched on, is in a movie, pages can take six months to write, and when you are doing a soap, you’re actually following those characters day by day. In Eastenders, for instance, Arthur’s unemployment worked as a storyline, it was the best way of doing it. If you were to do this storyline as a movie: there’s a middle-aged guy who’s out of work and he goes downhill, and he ends up in the shit, it wouldn’t take an hour and a half. Soaps do characters and detail better than anything else. There’s a lot of things that soaps do a lot worse, but that is one of the things they do very well.
That’s part of the process that Yvonne’s talking about – you thrash these ideas out in a meeting. It is a world where if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to other people, but you need to stick with what you want and what you think will work and sometimes you have to fight to get that through. The way it works [in soaps] now is very different from the way Tony and I did it when we first started. Instead of having a team of 27 people, like you have now, I used to say, “What do you think of that Bill?”, and he’d say “I think it’s terrific.”, then I’d say, “Right, we’ll put it in”. So we did. Now a storyline can be run past wives and cleaners, and 4 million other people, then it comes back and someone says, “can you do a bit more with the Labrador?”. It’s not quite so much fun.
TMcH
Does that mean you used to consult with yourself, and say I think that’s splendid! [laughter] That’s why I like being Executive Producer.
BL
Now it is a more collaborative process, as Yvonne said. I still think it works though.
YG
I’ve written for Coronation Street, and Rob, you’ve actually acted in that. Would you like to tell us what you did in Coronation Street?
BL
I started life as an actor, but I started writing as soon as I could pick up a pen. The difference is when I actually started earning a living from writing and that was on a Soap. One of the big turning points about writing for TV, bizarrely enough, came when as an actor I was asked to kill a character off in Coronation Street. There was a character called Ernie Bishop, who had been in the show for a number of years, and whose wife, I think, is still in it. They said, “Would you like to come and kill-off this character?” I said, “Yes, fantastic!”
I only used to play good guys, so it was great to hold a shotgun. It was the scene where he was held up in a wages snatch, and I blew him away with a shotgun, it was fantastic, there were car chases. After that I went off to do a film in Jersey called Force Ten From Navarrone. One afternoon when I wasn’t filming I was sitting in a café writing away when this little old lady came up to me and looked me in the eye, and said, “I know you”. I went, “I’m sorry, I haven’t met you”. And she said, “I know you – murderer!” I said, “I’m sorry”, “Coronation Street!” she said, “ Poor old Ernie!”. Then I went all actor-ish and went, “But of course, I’m an actor and I was merely playing the role”. But she got a brolly and waved it at me saying, “Yes, but I know your sort!”. For me, I suddenly realised, people believe this, and it’s fantastic. At that stage I had done some fringe plays that only my mates and a few people with guide dogs had gone to see. For me, seeing that woman, I realised television was a way to get to and affect a vast audience.
YG
When I worked on Coronation Street it was very writer led. As a result, the writers had an awful lot of say over what was going to happen. Each series in a soap is run slightly differently, but on Coronation Street it is a very writer-led system, and I think as a result it is very strong, both in terms of creative ideas but also dialogue and characterisation. It’s tough being a writer on Coronation Street because so many people in the country have grown up with it – it started in 1961 remember and it’s gone from strength to strength. The problem with writing for a programme with such a heritage is that you’ve got an awful lot of audience knowledge that you have to look to. They know the characters so well, if you get something wrong they’ll tell you! The producers also have to be very script and writer savvy - so it’s a brilliant show in the sense that it really is about the writing craft.
Rob, how do you think that differs from a show like The Bill?
Rob Gittins
With The Bill and more interestingly Eastenders the process has actually come full circle over the years. The story process when I first joined Eastenders was much looser. The routine was to practically jot the episode idea down on the back of a napkin or fag packet! But back then it was on twice a week, now it’s on four times a week. The other problem is that it’s actually very successful, and therefore the BBC is very jealous of it and jealous to maintain its success. That adds to the pressure as well. The interesting thing about the story process on Eastenders is that in the last two years, it’s reverted back to a model that Bill and Tony would recognise again. Before the stories would come in fairly haphazardly, the story department would come up with a couple of stories, and these would be passed on to the writers but it was all a mishmash and the writers didn’t feel any ownership of the stories. What the BBC did to rectify this was create a team of core writers, about twelve, with the idea we would get together, once a month, and have a story conferences so there was a core of twelve writers who were writing a certain amount of episodes a year. This gave the show a consistency and direction and this was coming from the writers – not the producers or directors. I suspect, oddly enough, Eastenders has come to emulate Coronation Street.
YG
When you’re working on soaps or long running dramas, you want to be creative and put your stamp on what you’re doing, but also as a producer, the worst thing in the world is a writer coming in and saying that they’ve got a ‘vision’. You want the writer to come to you with all their talent, which is why you’ve employed them. You also want them to understand that you, as a producer, have also got a vision and an image of the show. As a producer, you’ve also got the weight of the exec or the commissioner on your shoulders. In my experience in Holby City, I had to make sure that it delivered more than 6 million viewers a week which in 1999 was a lot. Fortunately, with Tony’s help and others, we did turn it around and we got 9 million viewers. The producer has a tough job. They want and need to encourage the writers but at the same time they have to be sure the writers are fulfilling the demands of the show that existed before they arrived.
TMcH
There’s a balance to be had. For me, there’s a tendency to make things homogenised. I believe in a house style. In the days when I used to put teams together, I’d want a fairly diverse team. Someone once said to me, “a happy show is a shit show”. I’ve always believed that to be true. I like a diverse team of people who argue. I always think you get really crap stories when people agree, I like a bit of heated debate and argument. Occasionally, people are thinking ‘what does somebody want me to say?’ which is the worst thing. I do believe that if you feel something, get it out there. And if someone says ‘that’s bollocks’, you’ll probably get something good out of it. A house style is good, and I like people to be able to know what the show is when they turn the TV on, but within that there is room for self-belief.
BL
All the shows have different styles. For example Eastenders and Emmerdale are driven by the regular storylines. On The Bill, Holby and Casuality, you’re asked to bring your own guest stories to it. In either case it’s not about stifling the creativity of the writer, but asking them to use that creativity in a certain way.
YG
That’s a good point. It’s hard to write under restrictions, or with the producer looming, and with the horrible pressure of delivering at least 6 million viewers an episode. But also there is a bit of freedom for a writer, because unlike when you’re creating your own project, and you’re your own critic, editor and producer, you’ve got a team of talented and experienced people behind you, helping you to do it, to get that first draft through to camera ready script. That structure can be really helpful. Do you find it easier to have pressure put on you by a producer or an exec, rather than have to put the pressure on yourself as a writer doing your own thing?
RG
The key skill involved in working on long running series, is to work out story problems that have been imposed upon on you. You have to make them work. These aren’t my stories, and sometimes they’re not my characters, but I still have to make them work. That’s an incredibly valuable skill. If it was my own story and I had a problem, I’d start again and do something else because it’s too hard. On a soap I can’t do that. I’ve got a page of notes that have to be fulfilled. I don’t like any of the notes, but I’ve got to make it work. That’s valuable in terms of what’s imposed upon you.
We’re forced to be creative. Those parameters make you think in a creative way, if you’re that sort of person. It needs the kind of person that can attune to that idea. I can tell you a thousand stories that happened on Eastenders, like Kathy and Pete going on holiday and Pete’s only available on the lot and Kathy’s only available on the studio. But they’re having a row about something, so how the hell do you get them together? Bizarrely enough, you find a way on those sort of things. I was in Antigua, of all places, and I received a fax saying it was Ethel’s 80th birthday party in the Vic and Gretchen (who played Ethel) had broken her ankle and wasn’t available. The whole episode was about her, leading up to her party. So you have to re-write and find away. We re-wrote it so that she didn’t turn up to her own party. That’s an extreme case, but you’ve got to make it work, and that forces the creativity.
BL
There are times where they’ll ask, can you move this into the studio? I’ll say, yeah fine, but they’re selling cows. That’s hard. You usually get through it, and you find there’s more freedom than you imagine as you get going because my mantra is always – what I pick up is the previous writer’s business, what I deliver is the next writer’s business, but what goes on in the middle is all mine. Producers and Script Editors don’t always think of it like that, but you can persuade them if you work hard at it. As long as it doesn’t screw up the next person, or hurt what the last person did, you’re fine. They’ll tell you that you’re not but you are.
YG
I used to say that Holby City was like a necklace where the episodes were the beads – not a complex metaphor - but it does make sense. As a producer you need to orchestrate and care very much for the throughline: the long running ideas, tone and shape of the show. You’ve got to see the overview and see longitudinally and laterally. We’re not thinking episode by episode. The writers are brilliant at that, because they will own their own episode. What you have to do as a producer is make sure episode one ties up with episode two, and two hands the batten over to three. That’s what I love doing - that collaborative thing where you’re all working as a team, you’re working on something that has an homogeneous approach to it. It’s got to look like it was created by one very multifaceted person, but individually the writer has got to enjoy the process of doing their individual part. In a long running series, there is a script editor and that is how I got into television working on Eastenders. I came straight from theatre and didn’t know what a script editor was, but I had a feeling that it had something to do with scripts, and as a theatre person I was pretty heavy on scripts, and I used to be an actress. Helen Grange, who was then producing it, gave me a chance. Tony was one of the writers that I script edited, and it was a role that was really essential and I was sorry to have to leave it. There was a point where I said that I had to produce it, but part of me wanted to carry on script editing, because it is a really integral role. It pertains only to long running dramas. Tony, do you have relationships with script editors, and do you find them important?
TMcH
When I first started writing for television, it wasn’t on long running soaps but my own material and in that case a script editor was really the liaison between the producer and me, the writer. They didn’t have a creative role, this was something that soaps created. The soap created the role of the script editor because they needed someone to keep a handle of all the episodes in terms of continuity: character continuity, story continuity. They also needed someone who had a relationship with the writer in order to make sure there was this continuity. Script Editor has become a far more creative role over the years. A good relationship with the script editor is absolutely paramount. You need a good relationship with a script editor if they are to get the best out of you and for you to get the best out of the episode. It doesn’t always work, that’s the bottom line. There are probably three script editors I’ve worked with in my entire career: one I had up against the wall, not biblically but throatfully, because they just didn’t get it together. But on the whole you will find a way of working with a script editor who ever they are.
BL
There are far more than three script editors I haven’t got on with. On Emmerdale they are a good crowd, although sometimes even then you can get an awful one.
YG
What makes for a bad Script Editor?
BL
They have a clipboard usually and they start talking to you about odd words. The odd thing about soaps is that you’ve got to work out that the job of editing a soap, is different from editing for anything else. It can be a lovely job, but the point is on a soap there are three teams out there all shooting episodes, and shooting four episodes each. There are twelve episodes being done at the same time. It is incredibly fast and being made all the time. As a writer the actors are never trying to destroy your dialogue, they just can’t remember the lines, or it comes out differently. As an editor on a soap, the first mistake you generally make is to say that “this stage direction on page 37…” not realising that most likely, with the pressure on set, it will change anyway…
YG
They get pedantic…
BL
… And I say, “I don’t give a toss. Do what you like, and change it if you want to, the actors aren’t even going to read it”. You need to have some grasp of a throughline, and the editors I like are people that you can discuss what you’re doing and where you’re going, what the thrust of it is. It’s not about odd words, but about the thrust, the throughline, the tone and the movement of the thing. Funnily enough, that’s actually much harder. There are certain people who feel much more comfortable saying there’s something on page 57. What we really need is someone who has a feel for where the episode is going. You need to be on top of it as an editor. If you don’t understand the nature of soaps or can talk about episodes and stories in these broad strokes then you’re never going to do a good edit with the writer, and the writer isn’t going to do a good edit with you. It should be a discussion and it can be good when someone new comes in and has an opinion. You love it as a writer as you get tired otherwise. There are moments when someone with a fresh approach and a fresh idea is great but the person with the clipboard that’s talking about the “but” on page 27 is just a pain in the arse, and I have been known to reduce them to tears.
YG
A script editor is basically a mouthpiece between the writer and the producer: they take the producers notes and hopefully diplomatically give them to the writer. Do you think it would help if the writer could be his own editor?
RG
The idea of a first draft is nonsense – my first draft will have been through five or six drafts. There’s always self-censoring anyway. I’ve never been an editor, but I’ve worked with inspirational editors like Tom Pollock who created Eastenders, and you felt with Tom that he was very much on the side of the writing. Dangerous editors are those that want to be writers, and they decide to practice on your work, that’s the biggest problem. You say, “that would make this scene different, it wouldn’t make it better”. The best edit that I had when I was writing a scene for Den and Angie on Eastenders was to imagine that Stand By Your Man was playing very softly in the background of the scene. It was the best note that I ever had and it didn’t refer to a single word of text, or stage direction, but I went away and re-wrote the episode.
TMcH
What Rob is talking about is black and white editing, you write black and they say can’t it be white? I say, well I’ve not thought about it being white – yeah but let’s make it white. It doesn’t make any difference! And at the end of the day, it doesn’t make it better. That, and patronising me. Don’t fucking patronise me! Because then you’re going to get up against a wall by your throat
RG
You have to think sometimes, is this just different? Because you could go to a writer and say, I’m not sure about this. It’s just different ways of saying anything. But you learn after a while that there are different ways, and those picky things are sometimes a waste of time and by doing them you miss the wider things. There are episodes that don’t have the emotion and don’t tell the audience what you want to tell them, not because of a line on page 37, but because you haven’t engaged them and brought them in. Those are the sort of things that you want from an editor, one that will keep at you and ask, ‘why do I care?’
Questions Taken From The Audience:
Audience Member
There are a lot of women that are on writing courses and that want to be writers. Do women have the balls to survive in the scenario you’ve just described?
TH
Some people are forceful and it’s good to have your opinions and stick by them. People sometimes sit in meetings and think, “I’m not the type of person that talks in meetings”. If that’s you I would say, get another job.
YG
That’s true. You do need to have an opinion and you do need to voice it.
AM
Does a shadowing scheme work on serials?
YG
I can say that when I worked on Eastenders in 1991, we did bring a scheme in that was a shadow scheme. [Turning to the writers] Did you have anyone shadowing you?
TMcH
No.
YG
Tony Jordan was another writer that we used a lot that virtually wrote the show himself. We’d take writers that were new to television but had something already published, very often from radio, and they would shadow an established writer from the show. It worked, but that’s when Eastenders was twice a week. The more successful you make a soap, they begin to eat themselves eventually, as everyone is flying around like headless chickens, and no one has the time to look for the new fresh blood coming through. But shadowing is a good thing.
TMcH
There is the Writer’s Academy (BBC) but you have to have had something published or commissioned. Writers on the academy tend to go to Eastenders, Casualty and Holby. They are all given a script on it. What’s interesting about it is that some of them work out really well, and some of them don’t. It’s quite a difficult job to do, to come in and write that amount of TV very quickly. It’s quite a big leap to write 60 minutes as well. I know that sounds ridiculous, but to write 30 minutes of Doctors or Eastenders and then go to 50 minutes of Casualty or 60 minutes of Holby is quite a leap. On Holby (and I’m not just saying this because I’m working on it at the moment), that extra 10 minutes can be very hard. If you watch a lot of scripts they reach 50 minutes and then they will naturally start winding down, and everybody will start saying, ‘right, let’s go for a drink after work.’ It’s a big thing.
YG
It’s tough to come into an already established factory, and a lot of these shows are like factories. Shadowing is a really good idea, but a lot of the shows haven’t got the infrastructure to support it.
AM
I’m a director who, when I worked on an episode of Casualty, brought up to the script editor bits of the plot that didn’t fit. How do you deal with stage directions and plot lines that just don’t work?
TMcH
I’ve got to be honest, it’s very difficult. The very idea for taking this job was to act more like a show runner in America, that I run the show and have a vision for the show. The difficulty is that at times I could go in and re-write every script. I don’t because I wouldn’t get a writer to write on the show: they’d say, well there’s no point in going to Holby because Tony will re-write all your bloody scripts.
AM
Sometimes things happen where you run out of time and something’s not working, but you’re stuck with it.
TMcH
And obviously I would say that doesn’t happen at all at the moment. If there is a re-write, the script would be junked and someone else would come in and work on it.
YG
I did the last Crossroads in 2003, after the re-launch. That was a case where we had a very tight budget and 250 episodes to get out. We were making doughnuts basically and each hole had to be that shape or else it wasn’t going to fit together. The budget was also a restriction. So in lots of ways we were doing it by committee. There were two producers, myself and a story editor, and we had to put the show together. Some of the writers were really good at this, and some of them, quite understandably, hated it. We were basically asking them to join the dots, because we simply didn’t have the time to risk it going off the page. I wouldn’t advocate writing by committee, and it would be brilliant if every long running series was writer led but a lot of the time it is as much to do with the budgets and the fact that you have to make five episodes a week rather than because that’s the way people want it.
TMcH
We all have this idea that the American model is great, and a number of times I’ve been asked to team write. But the Americans have a different take on writing for screen than we do here. Our writers don’t look at it as a learning curve: if you’re on a team in America, you know you’re going to be re-written by the show writer. You know that’s going to happen. You may put in a draft, and you may even get a credit, but chances are it will be re-written by the guy who has created the show. That is difficult here and doesn’t work, and part of the reason is because of finance. If at the end of the day in America you can remember you’re on a learning curve and you’re getting a shed load of money. But if you feel that you’re getting pissed on from a great height and getting peanuts for it you’re not going to be part of that. A lot of the time it’s simply down to the amount of money behind shows I think.
AM
You’ve all worked on a variety of shows, do you find something to love on every show?
BL
I loved Z Cars when I did it in the sixties, and it’s been downhill every since. No, you have to. The main thing is that you love your characters, and that’s genuine. We were going to talk today about the differences in television, and a lot of stuff now is more melodramatic and very story as opposed to character-led. But I keep with a quite old-fashioned approach; I do love my characters. I don’t like saying, is this person a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’, which is the current approach. You have to know whether they’re a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’, but no one is a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’ in real life. I’m going to write people first. It may come out as a ‘baddie’, but that’s a different thing. I wouldn’t stay on a show for very long if there weren’t characters. There are shows that I don’t like, but that’s a different matter.
RG
Bill’s point about characters is absolutely crucial. We have story conferences in Eastenders, but I’ve always said they should be called character conferences, because actually it’s not stories that we’re searching for, it’s characters, and they bring the stories. Kat and Alfie were created in Eastenders, and the interesting thing about the Slaters is that we brought this family in and for a year they did nothing at all. They had a dispute about the bathroom, and they settled into the square. We knew there was a massive story coming but we had to give those characters time to grow. If we’d blown that story within the first three months nobody would have cared.
YG
That’s the really good thing about soap is that you can invest in your characters.
RG
The characters are absolutely paramount and therefore you do in a sense have to love them and grow them and invest in the story you create for them.
TMcH
You have to love the show that you work on. You’ve got to like it. If you’ve got a writer that does it for the cheque it’ll show… although that wont be a problem on Holby! It took me ten years to get out of Eastenders because you just keep on staying because you like the show.
YG
It’s a bit like Holby, which I produce. You’ve got sixty minutes and I say to the writers that they’ve got a film really. You’ve got a beginning, a middle and an end. We’ve given them characters, this is the throughline of it can you just make sure that someone looks like they’re going to die at some point. They bring the human story and we wrap the medical bit around it. That’s really how we made it.
AM
Can you explain the shadowing system?
YG
I did this briefly on Eastenders. Myself and the other script editors would find a writer that we thought would do the cross over from radio or theatre into television successfully. And it would be a writer where I’d seen their work and liked the characters and knew that they could write dialogue. We would match them up with people that were really experienced. So they would shadow the process and a script editor would take in the new writer and the established writer and they would do a first draft edit session, then a second draft , third draft. In the days that I was doing it, it was twice a week and you’d get at least four drafts out of the shadowing process before the PA started shouting, “Where’s the script?”
TMcH
On Holby over the last two or three weeks, a producer said that he really wanted to write and they were going to take unpaid time off and shadow one of the people that are commissioned to write. At her own cost, she shadowed and delivered a better first draft than the other writer.
YG
That’s really tough though as well, because when you’re looking, as new writers, to get into television (like Emmerdale and Eastenders) it eats writers. You’re constantly looking for new writers, so actually there’s a hybrid that you need to create: someone that you know will join the factory and join the firm, and get on with everybody and enjoy the process, but also somebody that’s not going to be put off by the deadlines, and that can bring their own thing to the table. I’ve tried it myself, and thought right I’m going to have a go at writing, and I can honestly say that I was unceremoniously marched out of the script room twice. I had two goes but they weren’t good enough. To write a show, even when you’ve produced it, is a whole new ball game.
TMcH
But the idea that it’s some sort of closed shop is not true. When I started writing on soaps, there was Coronation Street, Crossroads and Eastenders which was two episodes a week. Now it’s four episodes a week, Casualty which started around the same time was twelve episodes a year; The Bill was a similar length. The amount of shows these programmes are doing are a lot more. Emmerdale is doing 312 a year when they were doing two a week when I started. Holby started doing 8 or 9 in the first series but now they’re doing 52 a year. Casualty does 50 a year. One year, they did 106 hours of The Bill. These programmes eat writers. It’s not a closed shop and all these programmes are crying out for anybody that wants to commit and has the talent.
AM
So how does a new writer break in apart from the shadowing scheme?
YG
There are various ways.
BL
You just knock on doors the same way we did. There are opportunities, you just have to keep knocking. My personal view on shadowing writers is that, if you can, get on any show and watch how it’s made. Writers nowadays are much more separate from the process than we used to be in the old days because in the old days you were always in the studio. One of the things that strikes me, in my grumpy old man kind of way, is that people don’t know what they’re asking people to do. They will run off a list of things to do, and you say that you can’t. If you find an opportunity to shadow anyone, go for it. See what happens. Nobody has any idea of the amount of work and the pressure involved and as a writer, because I was brought up that way, I’m very conscious of what I’m asking people to do.
TMcH
One of the Academy writers that we had on Holby turned in a first, then a second draft, then we literally brought him into the studio and walked him through the sets. So he started to understand the geography of what he was writing about. Up to that point he hadn’t thought to look at the plans that he’d been given. It’s about somehow getting to know that show. It seems incredibly frustrating. We’ve always been in your position if you want to write for television, and we’re not saying that we have a miracle. I’ve got a loft full of scripts that I had written that went out to the BBC and ITV, that came back with rejection slips. You learn by the scripts you write, and you will get better by the scripts you write and if you have talent and creativity you will find a way through.
BL
And a bit of luck.
RG
I did a radio play in the 1960s, and the producer was stuck in a traffic jam. This isn’t a route that I can advise anyone to take, but sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time.
BL
But sometimes, if you can’t get close to a show and if you can’t get into the Academy which only has 12 writers a year, it’s about finding out who the script editors are and sending them scripts all the time. The odd thing about script editors is that they’re looking to build a career as well, and they’re looking for writers. If they can discover a voice and a writer they will champion your work. But they can only champion your work through the scripts that you send in. Whether they’re original scripts, or whether you’ve got a story for Kat from Eastenders.
TMcH
Be a pain in the arse and keep bothering people.
YG
In summary, it’s a combination of tenacity, a calling card script, watching a show you like and writing a mock script of that show and looking at the credits. Ring up the script editor, and take them out. Script editors never get out so they’ll love it. Form a relationship.
RG
I have a mantra and that’s write is right. A lot of people go, I want a gig but I’m not really bothered about writing anything to get it. You have to keep on writing. This sounds crazy but if I go a day without writing, I get withdrawal symptoms. I go on holiday with my wife, and the second day I’ve got to write. It’s an addiction, and somewhere in me there’s a great script and there’s something that I want to say. And as a writer, that’s what you’ve got to do. Think about these shows, think of ways of saying what you want to say; get angry about something get passionate and write about it. Then wack it in and keep wacking it in, and eventually something will give.
AM
I got an impression that the chances of getting into writing for a show is very remote because you’re relying on your script being passed round by so many people, but you seem to be saying something different.
YG
Go straight to the people who made the television show.
AM
Are you saying that script editors will actually read these scripts?
YG
Yes.
TMcH
I take your point that it in the end it’s a job, and at first the job is getting a job.
AM
My point is that the BBC are saying one thing and you seem to be saying another.
YG
Do what the BBC are saying as well.
AM
Should you send in your own original work to a script editor, or a script that you’ve written for the show?
YG
Send in your own voice I would say, because they’re going to see beyond that, and an editor’s going to know. This person’s got a good voice and I like her humour or whatever.
TMcH
It works differently to America where you would be expected to send in a sample script of the show that you want to write for. Here we tend to prefer something that shows something that you care about and are passionate about. I just want to know that you can write a fucking script.