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How did you both get into writing – was it something you both had an interest in growing up?

[Harry] Our father is a writer and would make up stories when we were younger, and so it’s something we just grew up with. [Jack] I’ve always wanted to write since I was five and started out doing bad short stories.

What path have you taken to where you are now?

[Jack] I worked at a TV production company as a script editor for a while, where I read a lot of scripts and decided maybe writing TV would be better than the novels I couldn’t sell. When I was 25 I wrote a comedy-drama for the company I was at, which was turned into a ±«Óãtv sitcom. It wasn’t good, but it’s how I got started.

[Harry] I was an actor for a while and in my early 20’s wrote a sitcom about a recent break-up, which was eventually made into . As Jack and I worked on sitcoms separately we increasingly found ourselves asking each other’s opinion and advice, and ended up writing Roman’s Empire together.

[Jack] We’d been in a band together when we were younger and we argued far more about writing songs than we ever have about writing TV shows.

Which TV or Radio programmes or films have inspired you or have stayed with you?

A wide variety of things, to be honest. We watch a lot of TV. Too much, perhaps. Growing up, Thursday nights was ER and Friends night. We watched shows like Quantum Leap, Murder One, Cardiac Arrest, Alan Partridge, Seinfeld… Cracker was a big one and is still something we talk about. The first two seasons of Arrested Development are as good as it gets for us comedy-wise. More recently – was British Television at its best for us. As was . The finale of Breaking Bad was coming out as we wrote so we were very aware of how good serialised television writing could be and that dark place you could take audiences. Also Lost – whilst being a completely different beast – was an inspiration for The Missing (in that it told two stories over two timelines throughout the show). So lots of things. Too many to mention.

Which ones do you disagree about?

We don’t tend to disagree much about shows – there’s the odd one that one likes and the other doesn’t. But more often than not the other will see the light eventually.

How does your writing partnership work?

We sit in a room together (for drama, anyway) and talk through the story and the show and the characters. After a while once we’ve got a handle on the world we’ll beat out the story. Then we’ll divide up the show – either into scenes one of us has a particular passion for, or just cut it in half. Then we go away and piece the thing together – then we swap halves and edit each others. The rules are nothing is sacred and as long as something’s being replaced with something better or something that satisfies both of us it goes in. If there’s something one doesn’t like we just find another way through it.

Do you have distinct roles?

We don’t have distinct roles really. We have differing strengths, though those are always shifting and changing depending on what it is we’re writing. It’s kind of an ever-evolving thing, which is nice because you don’t really ever get too comfortable.

Is there an element of healthy competition? Any advice you can share?

Yes there probably is. Certainly having the other one there, knowing that they’re working, you have to raise your game and earn your place. You work longer hours, at least. At the end of the day both of you are held accountable for your successes or failures and you don’t want to be the guy who screwed it all up or didn’t pull their weight.

What key differences have you noticed between the writing system in the UK and the US?

In the US you get paid more. Which is nice. But it’s also much more of an assembly line. Even cable networks put out between 10 and 13 episodes a year, which is more than we’re used to doing in this country. For that to happen, you need a writers room - a group of salaried writers sitting together day after day deciding what to have for lunch, and also writing sometimes. When in production they’ll have a matter of weeks to break a story and have a shooting script ready. Compared to the months and months you have to polish and refine a pilot. It’s just a different way of working to fulfil the need American networks have for longer runs.

What was your experience of the ?

Writing comedy can be soul-crushing because no matter what the script is like, it’s so dependent on cast - how they interact together, how they bring the character to life, etc. Comedy Feeds are a good way to see how it’s working and give you time to adjust and learn from your mistakes, and doing that at a lower budget is really useful. The downside is the budget is very small so there’s always a danger it looks cheap. Even though it is cheap. But it’s a great place to try things out and see what works.

With reference to The Missing - What is it like transferring from Comedy writing to writing a Drama covering emotive subjects like child-abduction and paedophilia?

Going from comedy to drama was something we’ve always been interested in. We’ve both independently written (both unpublished) books and plays and been drawn to darker, more dramatic writing. So it’s not a huge shift, it’s just actually being made now, which is nice. We do use a lot of the things we learned in writing comedy - structure especially, because there’s so little time in comedy and you have to set things up so efficiently. Set up and payoff are things you also need to do in drama, and we still use the same language when talking about drama as we did when writing comedy.

For example, there’s a phrase we used when writing comedy called ‘tight pants’, which we nicked from Jeff Greenstein (Will & Grace showrunner). When he was doing a particular scene - it wasn’t funny. Something wasn’t working, so they gave the lead really tight trousers (or pants, if you will). Instantly the scene was funny. You have a character who wants to do something (put on some tight trousers) which is nothing to do with what the scene is about, and it gives it specificity because the scene is no longer just about one thing. So when writing drama scripts we sometimes talk about ‘dramatic tight pants’ - which is really just about giving a scene more layers so you’re not always just laying out plot but finding room for character. It’s a similar process in many ways, except rather than chasing a joke, you’re chasing the drama and the emotion. There’s more room for lyricism.

What are the responsibilities especially as it will draw comparisons with real-life cases?

There are inevitable comparisons with real-life cases - not just in the UK but several prominent ones in France and Belgium - largely because there is a horrid familiarity about the way these cases unfold. The responsibility you have as a writer is to respect the subject matter you’re dealing with. Good drama should reflect real life, and all you can do is try your best to do that as sensitively and truthfully as you can, and not to shy away from that by sanitising it or making it ‘TV’.