BBC Continuing Drama Q & A

On Thursday 4th March I attended an event organised by the BBC writersroom in which representatives from their continuing dramas (Eastenders, Holby City, Casualty and Doctors) spoke about what they do. Or, as I like to call it: Pick Me, Simon Harper. The room was full of eager and, I’ll admit, somewhat mental wannbe writers.

On the panel, among others, were John Yorke (Controller of Drama Production), Ceri Meyrick who works with new writers, writer (and now producer) for Holby City Justin Young. I first met Justin during my placement at Holby City, and was lucky enough to sit in on an all day storylining meeting with him.

Many aspects of what they spoke about are covered on the writersroom website, and some of their tips I had already spoken to people about during my placement on Holby. However no matter how many times I have heard similar ideas (“be passionate” being the most common thread) I just love to listen to writers talk about writing. Here are some titbits I picked up - new gems and old pearls of wisdom:

General writing tips
-“Write that half hour like it’s the most important in your life.” John Yorke
-Don’t write a script that you hope will get you a job; write something that you’re passionate about. They receive lots of “competent but boring” writing.
-Make sure you love the show that you’re writing for.
-Too much exposition gives away bad writing. However most bad scripts are boring and just not memorable. Boredom is the worst thing for a script.
-The first ten pages give away if a script has potential, and all scripts submitted will be read this far.
-Send in the script you’re most proud of, regardless of what you think is most likely to get commissioned.
-Don’t take editorial notes personally.
-Screenwriting is less about the dialogue – storytelling should be in the stage directions as dialogue is about sub-text.
-Familiarise yourself with scripts, reading for TV, radio and theatre.
-They look for i) An individual voice, ii) The ability to create characters that resonate, iii) An understanding of structure.

BBC info
-Continuing drama is where writers learn their craft; it is likened to an emergency department, where you see and experience every eventuality and learn fast.
-Accept that continuing drama is a machine where you write collaboratively, but it is possible to retain your own voice.
-Scripts are only accepted from agents to specific shows. If you don’t have an agent submit scripts to the writersroom.
-Don’t submit a sample episode of an existsing show, send original work and remember that length (providing it’s over half an hour) doesn’t matter.
-Avoid gimmicks with your scripts, those sent in massive boxes or with money and gifts attached are viewed with suspicion and inconvenience people.
-The writersroom received around 10,000 scripts last year (eek!) and an estimated 5% of these were passed on.
-The Writer’s Academy receives around 500 applications for 8 places (double eek!). You can apply as many years in a row as you like.
-For Writer’s Academy submissions looking at the application form is left until the very end of the process, allowing the scripts to speak for themselves.
-Applications for the Writer’s Academy open from mid-April – you require at least one professional drama commission to apply, but don’t need an agent.
-Writer’s Academy is three months, with much of that time spent in a classroom, with visiting lecturers (past ones being Jimmy McGovern and Russell T Davies. Room for any more eeks?!) and one on one tutorials. A writer’s first episode of Doctors is developed in the classroom.
-They don’t get a massive percentage of applicants from screenwriting courses.
-Writer’s spend around 2 – 5 weeks on their first draft of an Eastenders episode, depending on where their commission falls on the production cycle.
-Don’t re-submit a script once you’ve received feedback unless the edited version is specifically asked for. Submit something new.
-On Doctors you get assigned your own script editor and you are then in their ‘stable’, whereas the others it can be a different editor each time.
-All BBC continuing drama focuses around A, B and C story strands.
-Each show has a lead writer and a core team of writers who are involved in the decision making for storys.
-Doctors works a little differently to the other three shows. Writers pitch story ideas as the show is designed to be something that new writers can bring their ideas to.
-Include directions, but not camera directions.
-Shadow scheme: if your script is successful they will give you a story document for an episode that has already run and do a test.

Five Days

Reports of the death of BBC drama have been greatly exaggerated. So things have been a bit slow recently – there’s a recession, for crying out loud. And you haven’t been able to open a paper over the last couple of months without reading another royal slagging off of beeb drama. However my faith has been restored with this month’s Five Days, written by Gwyneth Hughes. Over the course of one week five episodes charted the suicide of a mysterious woman in a burka. However first the audience is introduced to the idea it wasn’t suicide. Then we find out it wasn’t a woman, but a teenage boy in disguise.

With each episode there were new twists and coincidences, and every face holding a potential clue. Young boys on bikes in the first few scenes later hold video evidence that proves someone pushed the victim, and one of these later turns out to be the son of an investigating policeman.

Despite this drama being incredibly gripping, well crafted and with an excellent cast (Suranne Jones as a plucky-yet-lovable detective Laurie and Anne Reid as her mother Jen, in the early stages of dementia) some people are still not giving it a chance. Jeremy Clay for the Leicester Mercury claims that “to fill five hours of telly Hughes has knitted up the narrative thread into great clumps so she can spend five hours unravelling it all again.” This seems somewhat harsh; of course there are coincidences to pull the story together, and moments such as a white foster father having knowledge of which blood groups are most prevalent in the Asian community do seem contrived, but these blips are brief and overall the effect is tightly woven. As well as a thriling story of murder Hughes still managed to get the audience equally interested in a few budding romances, with some beautiful moments between Laurie’s mother Jen (Reid) and her new partner. There were also some genuinely funny moments among the tragedy – Laurie suggesting that she heard of how “some reporter wangled his way into Bagdad wearing a burka” to which her colleague replied dryly “Yeah, I’m not sure that’s a good tactic for wangling your way into Leeds.”

I look forward to Hughes’ next set of Five Days, and if I could ever write a drama like that I’d be pretty happy with myself.

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It is 10.47am on my first official day as a freelance script writer and editor. Now, that sentence glorifies the whole thing a little when basically, I just have a day off work and I'm fiddling around on my lap-top.

I've been at my desk (read: the kitchen table) for almost two hours now and so far, so good. At university I got the hang (after 3 years) of motivation to work and my peak working patterns so I was feeling pretty confident about working from home. Now this is just a matter of taking baby steps; I'm not going to write the next BBC drama hit, but a short play would do the job nicely. I can always hate it, throw it away, and start again.

Married, Single, Other

This week I watched ITV’s new thirty-something drama Married, Single, Other. The script, Peter Souter’s debut, is cute, funny and quirky – sometimes a bit too much of all three at once. The writer is guilty of overkill, and the witty lines can come at the expense of real emotion. The one-liners (“All you need is a model girlfriend and you win a set of steak knives from Cliches R Us” quips Abbey to cheesy womaniser Clint) are too dense and leave little space in between for the realistic dialogue and developing relationships. One particular scene that could have benefited from a strong editor’s hand was an elderly lady dying while being treated by Eddie, an ambulance driver. There is a short debate about trying to resuscitate the patient at which point Eddie’s colleague Flo says “we have to try” and Eddie’s response “No. No we don’t” could have closed the scene beautifully. He then added more explanation about covering her chest with bruises and “bringing her back to some kind of half life” which wasn’t necessary and spoiled the poignancy of the woman’s death. Sometimes it’s what the characters don’t say that means more.

Part-timer

I have made a big decision: from 1st March I am officially a part-timer. Things at work were getting a little ridiculous – after a minimum of a 55 hour week there’s no way I’m capable of putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard. Hello, 21st Century). And not only were no words getting written but I was brutally, desperately miserable. The kind of miserable where you can’t function, and staring into space blankly for half an hour seems like time well spent. So I have handed my notice in and going back to an advertising company I previously worked at for 4 days a week.

This was all spurred on by a job interview I had with Carnival Films for a runner’s job. I interviewed at Carnival just after leaving university for a post-production assistant role (pipped at the post by someone with two years experience, apparently) and contacted them again more recently looking for some script reading, so they called me in for the interview. Part way through Nicki Gunning (the production executive) mentioned it would be a massive pay cut from my current role. “Not a problem” I assured them “it’s only to be expected for this sort of role” and I had agreed with myself I would take a cut down to £18k. When they announced they were offering a salary of £15,000 pa for the job I hope I hid my surprise. The sums told me that once I’d paid my London rent and bought a monthly travel card I would have £36 per week left for gas, electricity, water, council tax, food and clothing. Not even tightening my belt would help – I’d have to sell the bloody thing. Or eat it. I was even more surprised later in the day when I received an email saying unfortunately I had lost out by a whisker yet again.

So, to summarise: an English degree from Oxford, 3 years advertising experience, a work placement at the BBC and I can’t even get a job earning a living wage in anything even related to television. This was low. I rang Nicki, apologetic for inconveniencing her but desperate to know what it is that I was missing – do I have body odour or an odd tic that my nearest and dearest have neglected to mention for 26 years? Do all the other applicants have doctorates in creative writing and an extensive list of fringe theatre credits to their names? Or maybe the casting couch is still in existence and when people say “come in and take a seat” they actually mean “come in, take your clothes off and orally pleasure me until I offer you the job”?? I had to know, and actually she was lovely about the whole thing. She explained all their applicants were strong, but most were younger and not experienced in the workplace. It seems that what people learn as a runner I will already have experienced: I know how to work, how to communicate in difficult situations, to sell ideas to clients or production executives, to solve problems and to work in a support role for a team. She suggested I get some more script experience and I think could serve as a useful contact in the future. But that all made me think – if an entry level job offers a salary of £15k, but most companies can’t even afford to offer me that right now, then I could earn more by working 4 days a week and offering myself up for free on the fifth.

I Feelgood...

Today I went to the offices of Feelgood Fiction, an independent TV production company who specialise in new writing talent. I sent of my CV and a short cover (begging) letter to them before Christmas and they agreed to meet with me. Laurence was very friendly and within the first ten minutes I got all excited again about working with these sort of people; ones who actually care about what they do and are interested in the same things I am. He asked me what the one book I wished I had written is. That’s a very good question, and a very different question to what my favourite book would be. I wish I’d written Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis – not my favourite, but so stylistically deft that I’m in awe of it. The novel has an inverted order of events, and this reversal in chronology compels the reader to question a reality and morality that is often taken for granted. It also provides a potent new emphasis to the meaninglessness of Holocaust ideologies by creating a novel where things make equal sense both forward and backwards. The conversation meandered on about this for a while, comparing Amis novels and we then moved on to drama. He quizzed me on favourite shows and writers, but strangely I wasn’t able to talk about them in as much length as I am novels. I suppose that’s because all my experience at university was talk about books, and maybe I’m not yet used to thinking of something I see as a hobby in scholarly terms.

Here are a few of my favourite shows:

Queer as Folk – for the characters; the dastardly Stuart who was such a bastard but written in a way that you can’t dislike. Stuart and Vince were two characters whose objectives were at odds with each other but I just couldn’t choose between the puppy dog and the object of his affection. It is a very talented writer who can write a lovable rogue who is actually a complete cunt.

This Life – A script full of dripping sarcasm and sexual tension along with a healthy dose of drug taking and binge drinking created a comedy-drama that actually fulfilled both aspects of the genre with aplomb. As I was 13 years old it wasn’t really suitable viewing, but I saw it as aspirational television. My mother would have been furious – but that was sort of the point.

Mad Men – beautiful, sexy, shiny drama. Shame advertising isn’t like that anymore, or many I wouldn’t be so keen to get out!

Six Feet Under – dark comedy. So, so dark. Loved it.

Shameless – (early series mainly) when this was still Paul Abbott penned it was one of the funniest, best, freshest things I’ve ever seen.

Clocking Off – Again, a Paul Abbott gem. I remember the first episode of the first series vividly, where a guy comes home to his wife and he’s suffering from amnesia. The advert said something like “He’s finally come home. But wrong house.” I don’t want to give away why but watch it. Awesome.

This list is all well and good, and most of them appear in the recent Guardian top 50 TV dramas of all time (LINK) but as Laurence pointed out none of them are new. I go and see plays all the time, but often Chekhov or Shakespeare or a good Alan Bennett. I know that makes me sound pretty pretentious, but at least with a big name writer there’s no risk of it being rubbish. Which is certainly not the attitude someone wanting to be a new writer should have. Ooops. So the advice I’ve been given is watch new shows, attend new plays by emerging playwrights, see what’s going on at the moment and what the public has an appetite for. And if I see something that I love get in touch with the writer and invite them for tea! I can just see it now: Dear Paul Abbott…..

New kid on the blog

There is a Russian proverb which says “if you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.” That pretty much sums up my attitude to trying to be a writer. I’ve tried everything: reading plays, reading scripts, doing work experience, searching for entry level roles, applying for PA jobs, knocking on the door of every production company I could find. The list is as long and tedious as the last six months of my life. But I’ve realised my mistake; I’ve been trying everything all at once. Apart from the work placement (which I’ll come onto at a later date) I’ve been hedging my bets and not really fully committed to any one aspect of these.

It’s difficult to do a rather time consuming day job whilst also trying to do another on the side. This afternoon I’m filling in some more application forms, this time for the BBC Vision Pool. This is a scheme run by the BBC for one year for a pool of freelancers. It’s a risky business; giving up my (relatively well-paid) permanent job, but at this stage I don’t have kids or a mortgage so it’s worth the risk. Plus I don’t think my sanity can take another six months of this frustration!

I hate applying for jobs. I doubt there are many people who enjoy it, but recently I’ve started to really despise it. Why can’t I just send off my CV and then the company will let me know if they’re interested? Instead I’m directed to their website to enter my details (which, by the way, are already on my CV) and answer some vague questions about team building. A few years ago, when I first went into advertising and was applying for grad schemes via the milk round my frustrations obviously got the better of me and I produced the below:

"I think I would be really good at this job. That is possibly more blunt than you were expecting, and I admit it’s a little immodest. After filling in about a billion (obviously an imprecise and slightly exaggerated estimate) applications I am finally going to try straight talking. If I did not think this job would be something I would enjoy and am more than capable of doing I would not be bothering to write this letter. Filling in boxes and trying to say, in a hundred words or less, what superhero trait you would like, or the last thing that made you laugh, or if you were a monkey what breed would you be and why. Ok, I did make the last one up, but it is not that far from the truth.

And now here this application is, asking for honesty and conversation. Well, I suppose this mild rant will at least catch your interest and stick in your mind - unless the previous applicant stapled naked pictures of themselves to their application or some other equally attention grabbing stunt.

So, anyway: it’s nice to meet you. I have to remember while writing this that those who already work for this company are people too, rather than the horrifying combination of Margaret Thatcher and Miss Trunchball from Roald Dahl’s Matilda I transformed them into in my head. And I hope you would like me- I’m very personable, and enjoy spending time with others, interacting with people and finding out about their views and opinions. I have a friend who uses me as a ‘buffer’ when she holds house parties, employing me as a way of mixing people; a volunteer for the no-man’s land between the kitchen and the lounge. One of my main strengths is in understanding and translating the needs of others, which I experienced working in market research and doing welfare training at university. I am creative and imaginative, enjoy writing and have an interest in popular culture such as music and films, but in particular contemporary novels. I think these interests promote creative ideas, as well as keeping me abreast of trends." And so it continued, with the slight glaze of insanity.

Apparently it was one of the most, er, interesting letters they received. So, am I brave enough to go for that tack on the BBC Vision Pool? I doubt it, as I don't want to take the risk. In hindsight I was only willing to submit the above because - let's be honest - I didn't really want the job that badly.