Latest entry
Survivors
- 20 Nov 08, 12:25 PM
A new series of Survivors starts this Sunday on BBC1.
Based on the novel by Terry Nation (which was, itself, based on the 70s TV series also created by Nation), Survivors is the story of the few who live after a virus kills most of the people on Earth.
(That's not really a spoiler... the clue's in the title.)
Anyways, we've got an interview with series recreator Adrian Hodges just up on the website.
You might also want to check out our earlier interview with Gaby Chiappe, where she talks about writing for the series.
And on Monday, we'll be putting up the script for the first episode. So if you want to read along as you watch to find out the difference between script and screen, either record the episode on Sunday, or check it out on iPlayer, where it'll be available for seven days after broadcast.
Recent entries
(mad scientists and all that jazz)
- 19 Nov 08, 12:41 PM
The BBC Archive has just put online some documents about the creation of Doctor Who.
Starting with an inquiry into whether the BBC should make Science Fiction dramas, the paper trail then starts to go through various configurations for a series, before settling on the ideas still in use today.
It's a fascinating look at how a drama evolves from first concepts (What are we trying to do?) to the creation of a series.
The College on Tour
- 18 Nov 08, 10:18 AM
So last week the College went to Manchester and had fun, despite the weather living up to the Manchester cliche of dark, cold and drizzly. Further entertainment was provided by a group of WWE wrestlers on tour who were staying in our hotel, and were pursued by some quite alarming fans - overweight, massively pierced, and obsessive. Although the Kevlar vests recommended by Aspie Boy were unnecessary, one day I found a bullet outside the hotel, and the next day I found a discarded black bra with large green spots. Make of that what you will.
We began the week with a visit from Jon Mountague, who established the BBC's Comedy North and is now its executive producer. Jon talked about his past career, which involved working with some, um, large personalities including Alan Davies, Danny Baker, Jo Brand and Dale Winton, before setting up shop in Manchester. The unit has been responsible for I'm with Stupid, The Visit, Massive, Scallywagga, and co-produces Ideal with Baby Cow. A new series of Scallywagga has been commissioned, as well as a series from We are Klang! and a series of Admin, and the unit is working on web content as well as planning for a potential series of low-cost pilots.
We looked at the pilot of Spacehopper, which became Scallywagga the series, and discussed what changes were made and why. As expected, they were a mixture of thoughts from the commissioner and channel, and analysis from the production team,which led to some re-casting, a new stylistic focus, and more young characters at the expense of older ones to fit the brief of BBC3. Further adjustments are expected in the second series, highlighting the fact that television series evolve.
The writers then embarked on their project for the week - re-storylining and re-writing scenes for a problem first draft of an established audience sitcom. At our summer workshop, the writers had asked for this one to have a practical element, so for some of the time they became a team, with me as sort of guide and sort of writers' assistant, trying to avoid giving away the solution that the production found for the episode.
It was an interesting and, as it developed, demanding experience, which if nothing else demonstrated that solving problems with a team is just as hard as solving them by oneself. The solution that the production chose actually hovered in the air before disappearing, but the analysis was good and the rewriting was enjoyable. Watching the finished episode was illuminating, and the consensus - though hardly earth-shattering - was that mainstream sitcom isn't as easy as it looks. Given more time, I think the group would have come up with a valid and entertaining alternative solution.
We had a surgery session, when the writers talked about how their original ideas were coming on and problems they were facing, which resulted in some useful suggestions. One good thing about the college is that it's not competitive, so people are happy to chip in ideas rather than guarding them in case someone else wins.
Then we had a visit from a winner, the Manchester-based writer Danny Peak, who came top in the Sitcom Talent competition of 2002 with his show The Bunk Bed Boys. Having won a competition in 1992, Danny worked on scripts without success until Talent, a remarkable example of keeping faith with your ambitions. Since 2002, he has written episodes of a number of shows, including Two Pints, My Hero and My Parents are Aliens, until being asked to write I'm with Stupid, and then gaining a commission this year for a BBC1 sitcom, Big Top as well as writing on Not Going Out.
Danny is a big P G Wodehouse fan, keeps a shelf of published scripts, and as a book for writers recommends Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.
Our third visitor was the Brighton-based psychotherapist and writer, Loretta Riordan, who did a fascinating session on the psychology of character, having endured a difficult train journey with many diversions and a coach full of drunken QPR fans on their way to defeat by Manchester United. (Arsenal's young guns triumphed over Wigan that night, though the senior Unreliables failed to follow suit against Aston Villa on Saturday).
Beginning with Freud's analysis of humour and jokes, continuing with Jung's archetypes, moving on to Adler's adoption of humour as a therapeutic tool, and advising avoidance of websites which talk about enneagrams and personality scales, Loretta instead recommended delving into the literature of transactional analysis as a useful tool for writers devising characters (the foriginator of TA, Eric Berne, has an entertaining book called Games People Play), and not least looking into oneself by keeping a journal and doing 'free writing' - essentially thinking of a character or topic and writing for no more than ten minutes without thinking. Then take the most important thought, express it in a sentence, and free write again.
As parting exercises, Loretta invited us to think of the person in our lives to whom we had felt the strongest negative response and to work out why, and to say without reflecting what our favourte fairy stories were (there was one confusion when someone picked Rumplestiltskin when meaning Rapunzel, doubtless Freudian in some sense).
There wasn't time to analyse this in Manchester, but I've been thinking about my choice of Sleeping Beauty. Am I the Prince or Beauty (in the spiritual sense, obviously)? Thinking about that made me think about aspects of myself and before I knew it I had invented two viable characters. So, as I heard no one say in Manchester, think on.
Event Horizon
- 10 Nov 08, 05:34 PM
Just a quick note to say that we've got a couple of events coming up you might want to know about.
On the 20th November, Sarah Daniels and Kwame Kwei-Armah will be talking about Radio Drama in London.
And meanwhile we're continuing to add dates to our roadshows - the currently confirmed dates are
- Manchester - 26 November 2008
- Cardiff - 3 December 2008
- Brighton - 4 December 2008
And there'll be more in the new year.
At the roadshows you can bring along your script and hand it to us in person, so you'll know we've got it.
So if you want to come along to any of them book your place here.
Russell T Davies Interview
- 6 Nov 08, 03:28 PM
Just a quick post to say we've got an interview with Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies on the website.
It's really good.
Montage
- 25 Oct 08, 10:15 PM
I've been stopping by a few other writerly blogs recently, good to read and I like the notion of a writing 'community' (I'm a fantasist I know), we need to keep in touch, talk to each other.
I used to go to my local writers group in East London once a week - we'd listen to each others work, drink tea, eat biscuits then sometimes retire to the pub.
Good times - it also gave me a deadline to write to, in the absence of any commissions. Some writers can be quite suspicious of new writing initiatives and training schemes, it seems.
I see my time as an Academy Writer as an apprenticeship - on the job training, and no you can't teach 'writing' any more than you can teach 'art'. But Da Vinci had his apprentices and he too was an apprentice himself once - there's a lot to be said for learning structure and technique, especially if you want subvert it, grow, become innovative etc.
So back to my innovative Holby episode that fell onto the doormat in DVD form recently. It has a title at last. I've posted before about how difficult it can be to watch my own episodes, it does get easier the more TV hours you clock up. I managed to get through this first viewing of 'We Said Some Things' without squirming too much or without having the script on my knee thumbing through the dialogue to see what they'd cut.
Holby City can be montage Heaven or montage Hell depending on whether you happen to love or loathe the device. Personally I prefer to montage at the beginning middle or end of an episode rather than montage twice or indeed in all three - there you can be heading for montage overkill.
Montages do have to be written, I don't just write 'Montage with music' after the scene heading and hope for the best. It is a compressed chunk of storytelling and needs to be planned and structured like the rest of the script. I always hope to marry certain lyrics with particular on-screen action, choice of music is very important. I did manage to get a Monkees track into my montage for one episode.
I'd really enjoyed constructing the final montage for this last Holby - it encapsulated my themes, it had some dancing, wonderful music, a period costume change.. (I kid you not).
My montage was cut.
True - my producer had phoned and warned me that once they'd come to filming they didn't think they could do my montage justice - given the budget and scheduling constraints. I had to make do with a trimmed down version and different music was used given that my overarching montage theme had been excised.
I was disappointed I have to admit, but the rest of the episode was really quite good - Hey ho, maybe it was just as well the ep wasn't upstaged by all singing all dancing montage madness.
Another problem with montages is that they eat up scenes. I'm writing a Holby at the moment that is quite pacy - lots of scene cuts, 4 story strands, lots going on - a nice meaty episode. I'd notched up quite a few scenes already by the time I'd finished. Then I found a wonderful place in the storytelling where I knew the only way to get the most out of the story was to tell it in pictures with music - I penned a montage sequence that promptly added another 6 or 7 scenes to my already bursting scene count. Granted each scene is probably only a sentence or two long .. but it may take some negotiating with scheduling.
Best montage? The end of Donnie Darko to 'Mad World'. Has to be.
He says, she says
- 17 Oct 08, 03:03 PM
So here are some thoughts on dialogue, which are more a meditation than a structured article.
In essence, the purpose of dramatic dialogue is to advance plot and illuminate character. In a comedy, dialogue should also be funny. Audience sitcom demands that it should be laugh-out-loud funny several times a page. Non-audience sitcom needs to maintain a level of funniness, and while one expects laughter, the frequency of laugh lines can be less. (If a non-audience sitcom is incessantly hilarious, then it should probably be made with an audience).
In thinking about the basic elements of comedy as the college scheme progresses, I find it impossible to avoid falling back on tradition, and the traditional view of dialogue is that every line should advance the story, just as every scene should have a point. In her talk to the last workshop, Susan Nickson cited John Sullivan as saying that if a show over-runs, cut the jokes, not the story. So it's worth considering the difference between funny lines and jokes.
At a commissioning meeting, discussing a script that I'm developing, I was told that there were too many jokes. This seemed a rather odd note for an audience sitcom, but what the comment meant was that there were too many obvious 'jokes', designed to get a laugh, rather than funny lines which would make an audience laugh, be true to the characters, and advance or comment on the story.
It should be absolutely clear in a script which character is speaking (there's an old reader's trick of blocking out character names and seeing if one can work out who is who from dialogue alone). Many new writers haven't quite mastered the art of different voices, so it feels that every character is speaking in the writer's voice, and that the characters have not been defined clearly enough. They are pawns rather than people.
Good dialogue is economical, with not a word wasted, and while dialogue should obviously convey information, it should be information with attitude rather than information alone. People telling each other stuff is dull, and people telling each other stuff that they should already know is just bad. Attitude is crucial.
The novelist Anthony Powell felt that one of the keys to avoiding the exposition trap was that questions should never be answered directly, which is a handy tip.
Clear characterisation leads to clear voices which allows actors to understand, and even add to, what they are being asked to play. Workshopping a script with a well-known actress was a tedious experience since she wanted to keep trying accents. The reason wasn't because the actress was being a diva, but because she couldn't grasp the character from the writing. When actors understand, they sell the words, even though they may not deliver them the way the writer heard them. But that's another story.
I think a useful thing to do - because I think it's very useful for people to analyse for themselves how things work - is to take a show that you like and that has worked for an audience - and examine the mechanism. Think about how characters have different voices, look at attitude, look at where the laugh lines come and look at how dialogue works with action and the physical.
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