Blog posts by year and monthJuly 2008
Posts (11)
Hints, tips and economy
As promised, here are some thoughts culled from the guest sessions at our recent workshop week. The message from three very different writers was essentially the same - pursue emotional truth. Paul Mendelson, when planning an episode of May to December, always began by asking - what's the emotional issue, rather than - wouldn't it be funny if? They were serious ideas which could have been drama, but were treated in a comic way. With My Hero, he kept a box of ideas about what could happen to each character in relation to another character. A pilot, he said, should contain the DNA of a series. Everything has to be in it. In sitcom, there may be a series arc, but characters don't change. A relationship has ramifications on other people, so a show about a man and a woman could involve her family and his family, her colleagues and his colleagues, her friends and his friends, providing a pool of characters on which to draw. Characters generate stories, and a rich group of characters can sustain many episodes. Hugo Blick advises: Wherever the pressure is, go elsewhere. So when Men Behaving Badly was all-conquering, Hugo came up with Marion and Geoff, about a man who just wanted slippers and a home to go to, but was locked in his own bubble. Also, he said,don't second guess what commissioners might want. Write something where you feel 'If I die and haven't expressed that, I'll be really disappointed'. And be sure in it's construction that you're saying something that hasn't been said before. Don't ape what has inspired you. Most of Susan Nickson's work conforms to a structure that is generally applicable - three stories per episode with three beats (introduction, development and conclusion) in each. She generally creates two big stories and a small one, so in an episode of 2 Pints there might be a sex story, a relationships story, and a silly story. When you're writing something, if you're not feeling it, then it's not working, she believes. Writers should feel the emotions their characters are going through. College aside, I've just been spending some time with an MA student working on a dissertation which asks if sitcom is dead. He is going to conclude that it isn't, but there is no doubt that the form is evolving and will have to continue to evolve. All broadcasters are under financial pressure, and sitcom is not a cheap thing to make. While it's possible to try and shoot more minutes per day of a single camera show, audience sitcom has unvarying requirements - a studio, sets and, of course, an audience, which makes cost savings hard to achieve. With both audience and single camera comedy, there is a keen demand for more affordable shows, and affordable means fewer characters, more recurring locations in single camera shows(which might be built in a studio rather than shooting on location), and a reliance on regular sets with no 'guest' sets in audience sitcom. For writers aspiring to write sitcom, thinking economically would seem a sensible way to go. Laurence Marks has often said that the great sitcoms could be played in front of a black curtain, by which he meant that good situation comedy is all about character, and that character is more important than the physical 'sit'. That was the cheery message that colleagues from C±«Óãtv, the drama department and I relayed to the Sharps writers yesterday, and it's one I'm cheering you up with now.
Organic, Moi?
The Radio Times has fallen out of love with Casualty I notice. No more warm fuzzy write ups in the 'Today's Choice' section. Now the reviewers seem hell bent on out doing each other with ever more verbose maulings of the Saturday night staple. Maybe I could start a column here reviewing their re...
Let's Pretend
Firstly, good luck to all the 2008 Writers Academy hopefuls being interviewed this week! My Holby episode is filming over the next month. Transmitted in September, I gave it a bleak autumnal feel at the end - characters battling home against the wind and rain etc. Only we couldn't have rain (...
College 7 and Paul Makin
While we were having our workshop last week, I received the sad news that Paul Makin had died. Paul was a unique comedy voice, who created a wonderful show called Nightingales, which wasn't like anything else before or since. We worked closely together on Goodnight Sweetheart, and he will be m...
Paul Abbott Interview
There's a new interview with Paul Abbott up at the Guardian. You can also read our interview with him last year.
Red Planet
Back again from a fortnight out of the office - did you miss me? (Don't feel you have to answer that.) Anyhow, there's three new opportunities up on the opportunities page for you to have a poke at, but the one I think is particularly worth mentioning is the Red Planet Prize. Specifical...
Comedy College
I went back to school with Micheal Jacob's Comedy College this week, dropping in on Susan Nickson's session. She discussed Two Pints of Lager, Grown Ups, her huge ego, stalkers, cancelling her own series, and the sheer terror of getting into comedy at the tender age of 14. They are also meeting ...
It's July - Deck The Halls
"So - have you been writing any of your own stuff?" asked a friend of mine the other day after I'd outlined the exhaustive timetable of dovetailing a Casualty into the end of a Holby hot on the tails of an Eastenders. I stared at my wall planner agog (we were on the phone) - had he not been listening? Does he know just how long these shows take to get right? Well in all honesty he doesn't know, he's not a writer, but even so. "This is my own stuff," I said defensively and it's an answer I often give. "Yeah ... but, It's not really.." he replied, I volleyed back that 'yes' he was right that it was a collaborative work in a sense, but it is my own stuff. I write it. I have to get defensive around this issue, it's delicate - I would love to say I have three or four pieces of work in development, that I'm nurturing several ideas of my own. But time does not always allow for this. I do have a melting pot of ideas on the proverbial back burner and I'm currently very excited at the prospect of developing a theatre piece with the company who produced Peter & The Wolf last year. But sometimes I don't feel like letting people off the hook that easily when they're pressing that 'Continuing Drama is too prescriptive ergo not writing of value and integrity' button. If anything, it's the production values and scheduling that cause these shows I write for to sometimes feel repetitive and implausible - too many stories and too many episodes. You can't tell me that fewer shows a year wouldn't boost quality and engender a 'desire' in the writers and the watching audience as opposed to an 'immunity' to story. Series breaks work that way. How can you know the joy of being sated if you're never allowed to feel hungry? I really enjoyed writing my last Holby, which is in the process of being signed off. My editor was very thorough from the word go. I had several stabs at my story pitches and tweaked, trimmed and refined the Treatment until I felt this guy, my editor, was verging slightly on the obsessive. Same with my drafts, "We're getting there.." would be his opening gambit, until draft 4 he finally said something like, "I think this is on the verge of almost being there.." It was like teetering on a huge precipice throughout, when would I 'be there?' when would it be safe to relax? Where was it I was going anyway? What my editor was aiming for was a smooth ride and we got it, relatively speaking - that's not to say the workload wasn't tough, but with all our preparation work behind us, by the time the exec producer got his hands on the script, it was quite tight. And barring a huge casting/scheduling cock up it shouldn't have needed too much tinkering with. The exec notes were entirely manageable. I relaxed a little. The Director now had his mitts on the script - again his notes were manageable. Now I had to think of a title - I suggested a couple. "I'll run them past the producer" my editor mused. Not that catchy then? I spent yesterday in Bristol discussing the first draft of my current Casualty. I can get quite nostalgic about Casualty - especially climbing the stairs to the offices in the portacabin hell that is the Bristol Casualty Warehouse. They have old Radio Times covers on display on the walls there. Mostly Charlie posing with some nurse or other - usually Duffy, under the title 'Charlie's Angels' and the like. Casualty was a Saturday night staple in our house when I was younger. One particular Christmas episode moved my angsty teenage heart and has stayed with me.. (if you are the writer of the following retro Casualty episode, thank you and please do get in touch!)... It was Christmas on the ward and all was very busy - during the episode an anonymous medic appeared (white coated in those days I believe) and moved from bay to bay surreptitiously 'curing' people in a very unassuming way. The medic left the ED at the end of the episode as enigmatically as he had entered, nobody knew who he was. Oh the true spirit of Christmas and all that... give me a bit of the old magical realism any time. My current Casualty, although not the Christmas episode, is a Christmassy episode and I've officially been given the go ahead to go tinsel mad if I so desire. And I do desire it. Also, someone will have to appear in a hand knitted Christmas jumper at some point, I need to get more crafting into my episodes.
The Not Part of Festival
Come to a session about 'Your scripts and what to do with them' with speakers from ±«Óãtv Writersroom and North West Playwrights at the Urbis in Manchester on July 8th. See here for details.
Sharman Macdonald Q&A
In case you missed it on our frontpage, we have a Q&A with Sharman Macdonald, the writer of the new ±«Óãtv Films release The Edge of Love, starring Kiera Knightly and Sienna Miller. There are limited places still available, so get your name down now! See this link.