UK Writer Winter 2009

Winter 2009

THE WRITERS’ GUILDGAZINEMA

UNDER THE MUDRoy Boulter takes a film from Garston to Hollywood

WRITING FOR THE ARCHERS

2 UK Writer Winter 2009

UK Writer is published by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain 40 Rosebery Avenue,London EC1R 4RX

Office Tel: 020 7833 0777Fax: 020 7833 4777www.writersguild.org.ukBernie Corbett General Secretary [email protected]

Anne Hogben Deputy General Secretary [email protected]

Erik PohlAdmin Assistanterik@writersguild. org.uk

Susan WoodPersonal Assistant to the General Secretary [email protected]

Tom Green Editor, UK [email protected]

CONTACTS NEW GUILD MEMBERS

Editorial and Communications Committee: Edel Brosnan (Chair), Zoë Fairbairns, Tom Green, Jayne Kirkham, John Morrison, Darren Rapier

Opinions expressed in UK Writer are not necessarily shared by the Writers’ Guild

Free to members of the Writers’ Guild. Subscriptions (4 issues per year): £25

Original design: Graham Lester George

Origination: edition periodicals www.editionperiodicals.co.uk

Print: Hastings Printing Co Ltd

ISSN 1748-9385

For back issues of UK Writer contact the Guild office

Full MembersPeter Byrne

Trace Currall

Deborah Espect

Peter Fudakowski

Simon Grover

Mary Hogarth

Alexander Holmes

Patrick Homes

Chris Johnston

Rob Johnston

Stuart Kenworthy

Michael Maynard

Ed McCardie

Joan Osbaldeston

Tom Pakinkis

Rosemary Pooley

Mark Tuohy

Candidate MembersTessa Adrian

Stephen Archer

Paula Ashcroft

Peter Boothby

Sandra Branco-Williams

Simon Caira

Susan Clarke

Emily Corcoran

Madeleine Coulson

Stephen Davis

Adisa Djan

Francesca Drew

Roger Dunn

Shannah Eagles

Jonathan Eley

Emma Excell

Stephen Hope-Wynne

Tine Van Houts

Wai Yuen Lee

Andrew McGrath

Thomas Nash

Jan Newlands

Nicolette Pearce

John Quinn

Mike Reynolds

Thomas Salmon

Doreen Williamson

Paul Weston-Wogan

Student MembersAnna Clarkson

Candice Clements

Petrona Donegal

Linda Dunscombe

Sheridan Humphreys

Veronica Low

Richard Mazaheri

Cara Moore

Antoinette Scott

Jeremy Wadzinski

Cover picture: Jasmine Mubery as Angel in Under The MudPhotographer: Solon Papadopoulos

UK Writer Winter 2009 3

EDITORIAL CONTENTS

16 Underneath The Archers

Three writers recall scripting Ambridge life plus the first miscellany for the show

20 From Garston to Hollywood

Roy Boulter explains how a community writing project became a critically acclaimed feature film

24 Long road to a short film

Graham Lester George on writing Washdays

26 The indie dream

Writer-director Maeve Murphy talks to UK Writer

28 Filming in Fraserburgh

Mark Jackson filed the rejection letters and started to make films

30 Rhyme and reason

Kevin McCann on the benefits of taking poetry into schools

32 Peerto peer

Blogger ‘Miss Pitch’ reviews the peer review websites

34 Tweettweet!

Martin Day explains why writers should take notice of Twitter

The aims of the Guild’s new good practice guide, Writing Film, are plainly stated:

■ To encourage co-operation and good working relationships between writers and other filmmakers

■ To enhance the rights and status of writers in the development and production process and, in particular, to safeguard original work

■ To offer practical guidance as to what writers should expect, seek or accept in negotiating contracts and working on scripts

■ To help writers on very low budget films to work creatively and fairly, through use of a Joint Venture Agreement.

It’s a practical document that should become required reading for screenwriters and producers

– a high profile launch at the Screenwriters’ Festival last month gave it the best possible start.

Although the state of the British film ‘industry’, such as it is, is frequently lamented, there is, in fact, a huge amount of filmmaking taking place in the UK. While the mega-productions with international finance, such as the Harry Potter and Bond films, might grab the headlines and the box office takings, thousands of other films get made.

It’s rarely easy. But, as several articles in this issue of UK Writer describe, with a combination of the right script, good collaboration and a huge amount of tenacity it is possible to get a film made and, just as importantly, seen.

Perhaps if the media were to give a little more coverage to the burgeoning short film scene they’d find that there was more about British film to be optimistic about. But at least now, with digital film and online distribution, it is becoming a little easier to bypass the previously all-powerful distributors.

As Mark Jackson says (Filmmaking in Fraserburgh, page 28), the important thing for a screenwriter is ‘to keep telling stories’.

Tom GreenEditor

REGULARS 4 News

12 Obituaries

14 Edel Brosnan

15 Julian Friedmann

Correction: The cover photo in the last issue of UK Writer should have been credited to Geraint Lewis


NEWS

T he Guild has published good practice guides for

those who work with writers

in film and TV. The booklets have

been sent to members with this

mailing of UK Writer and can also

be downloaded from the Rates

and Agreements section of the

Guild’s website.

Writing Film – A Good Practice

Guide is a comprehensive ‘how-to’

document that aims to bridge

the gap between the art and

the business of screenwriting. It

stresses that to be a success in the

industry you need more than just a

great script. Careful collaboration

with other key players is impera-

tive to ensure a script’s successful

completion and financial viability.

‘With this Guide, we’re encour-

aging screenwriters to roll up their

sleeves and get involved,’ said Olivia

Hetreed, the screenwriter behind

Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Chair of the Guild’s Film

Committee. ‘It’s not enough to

be good at writing scripts to be

successful in the industry. In order

to see your work through from

first draft to completed film, and

be appropriately acknowledged

for your involvement, you need

to know the business and build

strong working relationships.’

She is concerned that writers

can be isolated and not know

what to expect: ‘Screenwriters can

be worryingly naïve or simply grow

so desperate to see their script in

production that they sign up to

horrible contracts, giving up all their

rights for little or nothing.’

Bernie Corbett, General

Secretary of the Guild, added: ‘The

launch of the film guidelines is a big

moment for the Writers’ Guild. Now more than ever

writers need to understand the deals they

are making and the contracts they are signing.

Terminology, fees, credits, rights . . . our new

booklet sweeps away the mysteries and

gives screenwriters a clear and realistic route

map through the jungle of the film industry.’

Working With Writers – A Good Practice

Guide for TV Programme Makers is based

on an earlier Guild publication by Tony

Read.

‘It’s a response to Guild members’ many

problems and queries,’ said Guild TV

Committee Chair, Gail Renard. ‘Television

production and its personnel are

constantly changing and it’s imperative

that we’re all singing from the same hymn

sheet.

‘The new version of the guide explains

what members can expect every step of

the way of the production process. It also

advises how TV production personnel

should work with writers, so there can be reasonable

expectations on both sides – though writers

should always remember that profession-

alism is a two-way street.

‘The good practice guide covers

everything from a writer’s first ideas, to

progressing to treatments, outlines and

scripts. It also advises on commissions,

rewrites and, importantly, explains when

you should be paid (or, sadly, not.) It

outlines the writer’s role in production

and post-production, including screenings

and awards ceremonies, though it’s up

to members to write their acceptance

speeches themselves.

‘The Guild asks that everyone, both

writers and production personnel, read

and respect our new TV guide. Our

common goal, as always, is to make the

best television programmes possible and

to enjoy the journey along the way. We’re

hoping the new guide makes that easier.’

Guild good practice guides for film and TV


NEWS

GUILD LAUNCHES BOOKS CO-OPBy Nick Yapp

OVER THE past 10 or 15 years, the cult of celebrity

publishing and the trimming of publishers’ lists have made

it increasingly difficult for book writers to find a way of

bringing their work to the attention of the book-buying

public. Admittedly, at the same time, it has become much

easier to self-publish or publish online, but the big problem

has always been to find

a way of marketing and

publicising such books,

other than on a writer’s own

website.

Well, the big problem

may well have been solved

for, as they used to say in

the old Hollywood days,

‘after years in the making’,

the Writers’ Guild Books

Co-operative has finally

been established. It is regis-

tered at Companies House,

has a brand new logo, and

the inaugural meeting is scheduled to take place in early

2010 – keep an eye on the Guild’s email bulletin for further

details.

Membership of the Co-operative will be restricted to

members of the Guild who have already self-published a

book. In return for a joining fee and an annual subscription

– neither of which have been fixed yet as they will initially

depend on how many writers sign up for the scheme –

members of the Co-operative will be able to have their

books posted on the Co-operative’s website, with the

opportunity to include information about their books and

their careers, and with links to their own websites. In a way,

it’s like the windows or shelves of a bookshop. Anyone

who goes online will be able to see what members of the

Co-operative have on offer and will be able to order and pay

for the books they want.

It’s a new application of the old principle that ‘In union

there is strength’. The obvious advantage to members of

the Co-operative is that their books will stand among others,

come to the attention of a far wider internet public, and be

more easily available.

Any book-writing members of the Guild who’d like more

details should email: [email protected]

■ The Writers’ Guild Books Co-operative website is at

writersguildbookscoop.co.uk

Books

T he Writers’ Guild and the Society of

Authors have announced the results of the

Tinniswood and Imison Radio Awards.

The Tinniswood Award Winner (for the best

original radio drama script broadcast during

2008) – Goldfish Girl by Peter Souter, produced

by Gordon House for BBC Radio Drama.

The Tinniswood Award Highly

Recommended – Far North by Louis Nowra,

produced by Judith Kampfner, Corporation For

Independent Media

The Imison Award Winner (for the best

original radio drama script by a writer new to

radio, broadcast during 2008) – Girl From Mars

by Lucy Caldwell, produced by Anne Simpson

for BBC Northern Ireland

Awards of £1,500 (sponsored by the ALCS

and The Peggy Ramsay Foundation) and digital radios (donated by

PURE) were presented to the two winning writers by film director

and writer Mike Hodges at a ceremony in London.

Girl from Mars was Lucy Caldwell’s first radio play. As a playwright

she has won the George Devine Award 2006 and as a novelist she was

shortlisted for the inaugural EDS Dylan Thomas Prize.

Peter Souter was formally the worldwide creative director of

one of the biggest advertising agencies in Britain. Goldfish Girl was

his second radio play.

Also on the shortlists for the two awards were:

Tinniswood Award

The Switch by Ali Smith (David Jackson Young, BBC Scotland)

The Heroic Pursuits of Darleen Fyles by Esther Wilson (Pauline Harris,

BBC Radio Drama, Manchester)

Imison Award

Flaw in the Motor, Dust in the Blood by Trevor Preston (Toby Swift,

BBC Radio Drama)

Cobwebs by David Hodgson (Gary Brown, BBC Radio Drama)

All the shortlisted and winning plays will receive a further

broadcast on BBC7 during January 2010.

1 Tinniswood

Award winner

Peter Souter

Radio award winners

7 Imison Award

winner Lucy

Caldwell receives

her prize from

Mike Hodges

PHO

TOS: M

ATT CRO

SSICK


L ast year Arts Council England (ACE)

embarked on a Theatre Assessment to

gather an up-to-date picture of theatre in

England. In particular it looked to identify

changes that had occurred in the theatre

sector since the Theatre Review of 2001 and

the additional £25 million that ACE invested

in theatre organisations from 2003 onwards.

The findings, based on a consultation

led by Anne Millman and Jodi Myers (to

which the Writers’ Guild Theatre Committee

contributed), have now been published as

ACE’s Theatre Assessment 2009.

The report identifies several emerging

themes for ACE’s attention. It says: ‘The

development of a new approach to touring

is a major priority to ensure that audiences

countrywide have access to high quality work,

touring companies and venues are able to

plan ahead strategically and our investment is

applied where it has most impact.’

Though it notes that new forms of

theatre have developed over the past

decade, the Theatre Assessment is

clear about the value of the written play.

‘Traditional playwriting and theatre-making

attract large audiences and English artists

are rightly world renowned for their work.

We gave grants to new writing of nearly £12

million through grants for the arts between

2003/4 and 2007/8 and will continue to

place a high priority and offer high levels of

support to text-based work.’

However, the consultation process

revealed a number of concerns about new

writing including:

■ the increasing difficulty in putting on

new writing

■ the shortage of writers being supported

to create work for bigger stages

■ a lack of opportunity for second

productions of contemporary plays

■ the difficulty playwrights face in earning

a living wage

■ a lack of female playwrights

■ producers intervening with rather than

supporting the writing process

■ lack of support for new writers of

musical theatre

■ the difficulty of making Grants for the

Arts applications.

The section of the report dealing

with new writing explores many of these

concerns in more detail. For example: ‘There

was a widespread view among practi-

tioners that while there had been a growth

in development of writers there had been

a reduction in the amount of work commis-

sioned and produced. This was particularly

linked to changes in the touring circuit, and

perceptions that it had become increasingly

difficult to place ‘straight’ plays.

‘Respondents observed that a focus on

process rather than outcome has left some

writers out in the cold, without support to

draw them into the collaborative approach.

On the positive side, respondents identified

the development of individual skills through

collaborative working.’

The report states that ‘there was much

agreement that progress had been made in

a number of key areas’ in work for children

and families.

Developments have included:

■ increase in good work for young

audiences

■ work for young people and families is

more respected

■ much greater investment in work for

early years and teenagers

■ repertory theatres have started to

embrace work for young people.

However, concerns remain, including:

■ the lack of work for 7-to-12-year-olds

■ work for children and families being

squeezed out of venues focussing on

income generation

■ an emphasis on well known titles and big

brands, especially for commercial touring

■ continued lack of coverage in national

newspapers.

Following the publication of the Theatre

Assessment, Barbara Matthews, Director

of Theatre Strategy at Arts Council England,

said: ‘The Theatre Assessment has enriched

our understanding of the English theatre

sector and will help us determine our future

strategy, inform our investment decisions

and focus our development capacity.

‘We want our theatres to be bold and

ambitious. This assessment has shown us

that the additional confidence and resources

the Theatre Review generated enabled many

theatre organisations to do exactly that. The

task facing us all is to keep making progress,

in spite of the economic recession, and to

ensure that as many people as possible are

able to enjoy the results.’

Theatre assessment reveals concerns about new writing

NEWS

National Theatre Wales has

announced the programme

for its first year. Plays will be

in English and, according to

the launch brochure, ‘rooted

in Wales, with an interna-

tional reach’. There will be 12

new shows, one each month,

plus one spectacular finale,

in locations across Wales.

Talking to The Guardian,

Dai Smith, the chairman of

Arts Council Wales, said: ‘We

have been putting our toes

in the water for too long. It

was inexcusable, outrageous,

that we did not have a

national theatre for Wales. It

may be 100 years late, but

better late than not at all.’

Guild member Gary

Owen is among those

commissioned for the launch

season. His new play, Love

Steals Us From Loneliness,

will premiere in Bridgend in

October 2010.1Gary Owen: New play will

open in Bridgend


I’ve just spent five days in Athens, as a WGGB delegate to the

First World Conference of Screenwriters. Writers spoke with

a passion I hadn’t heard in a long time. I felt so inspired that if I

weren’t already a writer, I’d immediately become one.

Audrey O’Reilly, Chair of the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters

Guild, reported that never has less work been available, yet never

has the Irish Guild had so many new members. They’re beating down

the door, for the simple reason that you can’t stop writers writing.

Olivier Lorelle, writer and co-president of UGS in France agreed

that our goal was ‘to write the impossible script’, not just the possible

ones that can be turned out easily and with a template. ‘We want to

do work we’re proud of and that will change the world,’ he said.

Writers’ work is coming in fascinating new forms as digital media

develop and we must be open to it. Writer/ producer/ director

Yomi Ayeni is doing an innovative interactive reality experience,

Breathe. Check it out (www.breathewith.me), but it comes with a

warning: get too close and you might run out of air.

Opportunities are limitless with digital media; conversely, it’s

made the world smaller and given writers everywhere common

problems, for which we must find common solutions. For the first

time, high and low earners share the same interests. Digitally our

work will have an infinite shelf life (also known as the long tail) but

we must be paid for it, in both the present and the future.

We were reminded that the WGA strike two years ago enhanced

the status of writers worldwide, and taught producers and broad-

casters that writers mean business. We need to build upon that. As

Lowell Peterson, the executive director of WGA East said: ‘No one

will give you anything you haven’t the strength to take for yourself.’

And there are many problems writers have yet to address. There

was a call to end the possessory ‘auteur’ credit that directors have

taken in recent years. It was suggested any time ‘a film by’ credit

rears its head, it should be changed to ‘a film directed by’. Or

better still, as the recent release Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

boasts: ‘A film made by everyone’.

WGGB General Secretary, Bernie Corbett, warned we should

also be careful of language. In journalism, lobbying, presentations

We start from hereand PR, the word ‘writer’ is being replaced by ‘storyteller’ and

‘creator’ by ‘rights holder’. Both of these new terms significantly alter

writers’ legal and moral rights. We can’t allow this to happen.

There was also a general concern about collection societies.

Not enough of the money writers earn ends up in their pockets

and there is little transparency. An extreme case scenario explained

that commissions can first be taken by the foreign countries where

writers’ work is shown (perhaps 10%), on top of which there can be

‘voluntary’ cultural deductions (in Poland, for example, it’s an addi-

tional 15%), then foreign taxes as well as the writer’s own collection

society’s commission of another 9% or 10%. That’s before writers

have paid their agent’s commission of an additional 10-15%, which

means they’ve lost a sizeable chunk. At this rate, writers will soon be

paying for their work to be shown.

It was also pointed out that in some collection societies screen-

writers are, to their detriment, greatly outnumbered by scientific

and academic writers; and some Canadian screenwriters have to

fight attempts to divert some of their money to directors. All this is

making others rich, but not professional writers. Dr. Eva Obergfell, a

Professor of Law at Aachen University, Germany, said: ‘We need a

new form of collection societies. We have to make it better.’

The time has come for the International Writers’ Guilds (IAWG)

and the Federation of Screenwriters in Europe (FSE) to redress all

these imbalances. A common aim was declared: to work for the

dignity of writers worldwide and to assert our common rights

and goals. A new global organisation for writers was envisioned.

Together it would represent 25,000 writers around the world. That’s

a lot of Writer Power. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it would be

glorious if it did.

The conference ended with a video message from Frank Pierson, a

former Writers Guild of America chair and writer of the films Dog Day

Afternoon, Presumed Innocent, Cool Hand Luke and many others.

‘There was a time when the writers’ blocks in the studios were

bigger than the producers’ blocks,’ Frank said. ‘There was a time when

in the commissaries everyone wanted to sit at the writers’ tables... Now

we write in isolation in our rooms. We’re losing sight of our strengths.’

He asked us to remember that ‘no one gets paid till the writer is

done. That’s our strength.’

■ Gail Renard is Chair of the Guild’s TV Committee

Gail Renard reports from the first World Conference of Screenwriters

NEWS3Guild General Secretary, Bernie Corbett (second left), on a panel at the World Conference of Screenwriters in Athens

Best theatre playJuliet Gilkes Romero for At The Gates Of Gaza

Feature film screenplay newcomerEran Creevy for Shifty

TV continuing seriesCoronation Street episodes written by Carmel Morgan, Chris Fewtrell, Damon Rochefort, David Bowker, David Lane , Debbie Oates, Jan McVerry, Jayne Hollinson, Joe Turner, John Kerr, Jonathan Harvey, Julie Jones, Lucy Gannon, Mark Burt, Mark Wadlow, Martin Allen , Martin Sterling, Peter Whalley, Simon Crowther, Stephen Bennett

(Pictured: Chris Fewtrell, Simon Crowther, Mark Wadlow, Joe Turner, Jan McVerry, Jonathan Harvey)

Television comedy/light entertainmentGuy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton for Outnumbered


GUILD AWARDS 2009

The winners of the 2009 Guild Awards were announced at a ceremony in London on 29 November. The shortlists can be found on the Guild website.

Television drama seriesToby Whithouse for Being Human

Lifetime achievementAndrew Davies


Pictures: Simon Denton/WGGB

Television short‑form dramaPeter Moffat for Criminal Justice

Best feature film screenplaySteve McQueen, Enda Walsh for Hunger

Best theatre play for children and young peopleBrendan Murray for Scarlet Ribbons

Radio comedy/ light entertainmentDave Cohen Richie Webb and David Quantick for 15 Minute Musicals

Radio dramaKatie Hims for The Gunshot Wedding

Video gamesAndrew S Walsh for Prince of Persia

Outstanding contribution to children’s writingTerry Pratchett


NEWS

T he Theatre Committee of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain

is pleased to announce the winners of its fifth annual awards

for the encouragement of new writing. Members were asked to

nominate anyone who had given them an exceptional experience

in new writing during the previous year.

The winners are:

Sarah Brigham, Associate Director, Dundee Rep

Nominated by Neil Duffield:

‘Sarah commissioned me to write a play, Twice upon a Time, that could be

performed by a large cast of 14-to-18-year-olds. The unique feature was that

Act 2 should have a completely different cast to Act 1. Never having done

anything like that before I saw it as a challenge! Sarah was terrific to work

with – helpful, supportive and full of ideas. She set up a series of meetings

between myself and the young people as part of the process which turned

out to be enormously useful. Sarah regularly commissions other theatre

writers, most notably for the Playhouse Project – an annual new-writing

project which involves Dundee Rep, York Theatre Royal, Plymouth Theatre

Royal and Polka. I can’t recommend her highly enough.

Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director, The Globe Theatre

Nominated by Nell Leyshon:

‘Since he took over at The Globe Theatre, Dominic has chosen to be a

champion of new writing, and has programmed new plays on the main stage

as part of his season. This is allowing a range of writers, including myself, to

work with much larger casts, work on their stagecraft and stretch their experi-

ence. At a time when many theatres are working in a more development-led

way, Dominic’s approach is refreshingly free of bureaucracy, and he places a

great deal of trust with the writers. His passion and enthusiasm for writing on

such a large scale is infectious.’

Kevin Dyer, writer

Nominated by John Moorhouse:

‘In the past twelve months I have been shortlisted for The Writers’ Guild

award for best play for children and young people, the Adrienne Benham

Award and won the North West Playwriting Award and I would have

achieved none of this without the help and encouragement of Kevin. Indeed,

it is highly unlikely that I would ever have written a play at all without his

continued and unstinting support. Kevin is an excellent writer himself and yet

always finds the time to help and support other writers. I recommend him

for this award without reservation.’

Fifth World Theatre Company of Derby (Angharad Jones and Laura

Ford)

Nominated by Paul Buie:

‘Fifth Word produced my play Painkillers, culminating in three weeks of

performance at the Edinburgh Fringe and a tour of England. Although a

recently-formed company, they could not have been more supportive of me

as a new writer, nor more inspirational and creative, helping to shape the piece

as it developed over time and then providing a wonderful, polished perform-

ance. It is largely because of Angharad and Laura’s support and insight that I

have committed fully to my writing, which is now a hugely important part of

my life.’

Bill Hopkinson, Director/Dramaturg

Nominated by Jane McNulty:

‘Bill proved an intuitive, wise, sensitive and understanding dramaturg to me,

helping me immeasurably as part of a Northwest Playwrights’ Professional

Playwrights’ Development process in developing my play Our Lady Of The

Goldfinches. As a TV writer fairly inexperienced in writing for the theatre, I

found his help crucial in shaping my play. He ‘got’ what I wanted to say and his

suggestions were never less than inspiring. His encouragement has meant that I

have the confidence to move on – I hadn’t been able to do this before as bad

experiences of writing soaps had dented my confidence as a dramatist.’

Arnaud Mugglestone, Director

Nominated by Frank Bramwell:

‘I met Arnaud while working on a short play for the First Draft Theatre Company

and he has since been both director and dramaturg of three of my produc-

tions. His astute and perspective insights into my particular style of writing

have been extremely beneficial to the development of my work. Working

closely with a writer, from the initial conception to the final production, is never

easy but Arnaud has approached each project in a very sensitive and, above

all, honest way, picking up instinctively on the energy patterns within the

writing and, where possible, suggesting alternative approaches. And all this

without losing sight of what is the end goal of all writing: giving the audience

the best possible chance to gain insights and entertainment from the work.

Arnaud’s talent has helped release the inner potential of my writing, enabling

my work to resonate strongly and forcibly with the audience, as witnessed in

their reaction to last year’s Shooting Clouds.

Theatre encouragement awards

Back row, left to right: Frank Bramwell, Arnaud Mugglestone, David

James (WGGB Theatre Committee Chair), Neil Duffield and Bill

Hopkinson

Middle row: Sarah Brigham, Gemma Nicol, Angharad Jones, Kevin

Dyer and Bernie Corbett (WGGB General Secretary)

Front row: Jane McNulty, Mark Ravenhill and Laura Ford

AN

NE H

OG

BEN/W

GG

B

‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote

except for money’(Samuel Johnson)

The good doctor’s observation may not be the

whole story, but it will strike a chord with many

professional authors and journalists. The creative

process can be highly gratifying, but the financial

aspects of your career are fundamentally important.

Experience suggests, however, that many writers

do not have the time or the inclination to become

embroiled in tax calculations or financial planning.

This is where we come in. The Authors and Journalists

Team at H W Fisher & Company is wholly dedicated

to writers. Our clients include authors, playwrights,

poets, national press and magazine journalists,

broadcasters and scriptwriters.

As specialists, we have a complete understanding of

relevant tax legislation and many years’ experience

in helping clients to minimise their tax liability. When

appropriate, we also advise in areas such as pensions,

investments and financial planning generally.

If you would like further information about the

Authors and Journalists Team, we would be delighted

to hear from you. We would be glad to arrange

a preliminary meeting, naturally without cost or

obligation, so that we can discuss your circumstances

and review ways that we may be able to help.

H W Fisher & Company Chartered Accountants

Acre House, 11-15 William RoadLondon NW1 3ER

Tel 020 7388 7000 Fax 020 7380 4900E-mail [email protected]


OBITUARIES

S creenwriter and Guild member Frank Deasy has

died at the age of 49.

Born in Dublin, Deasy’s credits include Looking

After Jo Jo, Real Men, England Expects, The Passion

and the final miniseries of Prime Suspect, for which

he won an Emmy award.

Speaking to the press, actor Dougray Scott

said: ‘He was quite simply the most extraordinary

and brilliant writer I have ever worked with and

one of the most extraordinary and beautiful men I

was blessed to have met. Whenever I spent time or

talked with Frank I always felt the warmth, wisdom

and sheer joy of life that I remember getting from my

own father. That’s how special he was to me.’

Deasy wrote about his liver cancer in The

Observer just days before he finally received a liver

transplant. Though the transplant came too late to

save his life, the publicity surrounding his story led

to a surge in demand for organ donor cards.

Jane Gogan, Commissioning Editor for Drama,

RTÉ Television, told the RTÉ website that: ‘Frank

Deasy was a writer for television and film who

brought a tremendous honesty and passionate

intensity to his work. Professionally Frank was

coming into his own, working on a range of projects

that were all major subjects: the Medicis with BBC,

a film project with Ridley Scott based on Philip K

Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and, closest to his

heart, was Gaza, a film that will star Helen Mirren.

He was also preparing to start on a project for RTÉ

following a family across 100 years.’

By Jonathan Sale

In 1962 Troy Kennedy Martin, who has died aged 77, created

Z Cars, writing the first nine episodes of the groundbreaking

realistic police series and returning in 1978 to polish off the last

one. In 1969 he scripted The Italian Job, which remains one of the

most popular British movies of all time. At a screening years later,

he observed the audience joining Michael Caine in yelling out the

familiar lines such as ‘You’re only supposed to blow the bloody

doors off!’ Both of these works are regarded as major events

in screen history.

Innovative and influential, Kennedy Martin showed that quality

drama could be accessible. His nuclear thriller, Edge of Darkness

(1985), one of the key television works of the decade, was

repeated on BBC1 a mere 10 days after the final episode had been

transmitted on BBC2. His ITV production Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983)

was also highly praised and was one of several works screened at

his 2006 British Film Institute retrospective.

Kennedy Martin was born on the Isle of Bute, off the west

coast of Scotland. His father was an engineer and his mother a

teacher. Moving frequently because of the second world war

and his father’s work, his was a talented and creative family. His

younger brother, Ian, is also a scriptwriter, the creator of two other

police series, Juliet Bravo and The Sweeney, as well as many other

works including the recent critically acclaimed play Berlin Hanover

Express. Their surviving sister, Mo, was a member of the folk group

the Tinkers.

The family established themselves in north London, only to

have the household income, never large, halved by the death of

Troy’s mother when he was 15. The Catholic church helped to keep

them afloat, and Troy went to Finchley Catholic grammar school,

1 Frank Deasy receiving his Emmy Award for the

final Prime Suspect: The Final Act in 2007

FRAZER H

ARRISO

N/G

ETTY IMA

GES

Frank Deasy 1960-2009 Troy Kennedy Martin 1932-2009


DU

NC

AN

BAX

TER/THE TIM

ES

Troy Kennedy Martin 1932-2009

middle of the script, as he sometimes did.’

His work was powerfully – but not overtly – political. He was

not agitprop. He joined the Labour party and went on anti-war

marches. He was critical of the bureaucratic direction he felt the

BBC had taken over the last 30 years. At a meeting during which the

then director general, John Birt, asked a gathering of scriptwriters

for their thoughts, he showed that, however affable in person he

was, it was just as well that he had not taken up diplomacy as the

day job. ‘Well, you see John, actually you’re a Leninist,’ he informed

Birt. ‘You’ve replaced a rigid and uncreative bureaucracy with an

even more rigid and less creative bureaucracy.’ Oddly enough, this

did not torpedo his BBC career.

A talented, generous and agreeable man, he was dedicated to

his work. He married the Z Cars cast member Diane Aubrey in 1967

and remained devoted to their two children after their divorce.

He moved out of the flat in Notting Hill, west London, where he

had lived during most of his career, and spent his last two years in

Ditchling, West Sussex, after Luke Holland’s television series A Very

English Village had alerted Kennedy Martin to the attractions of the

area. Had it not been for his sudden illness, he would have been

speaking to the local film society at its forthcoming 40th anniver-

sary screening of The Italian Job (he had no connection with the

less iconic remake of 2003, starring Mark Wahlberg).

He is survived by his children Sophie and Matthew, his grand-

children Tomas and Ella, his brother Ian and his sister Maureen.

John Caughie writes: Troy Kennedy Martin’s death is a reminder

of the importance of a tradition of popular and risky televi-

sion drama over the last 50 years. From his six-part anthology

Storyboard (1961), produced by his co-conspirator James

MacTaggart, Troy’s aim was ‘to tell a story in visual terms’, breaking

free of a theatrical naturalism in which stories were told by actors

talking while the camera looked on. ‘We were going to destroy

naturalism, if possible, before Christmas.’ His article for Encore in

1964, Nats Go Home!, was a manifesto for a television drama that

mattered, experimented, and aspired to be bigger than the box

that contained it.

The creative edginess of Edge of Darkness lies in a narrative

in which something real is at stake; a script that takes risks with

credulity; performances and a visual style that keep faith with the

risks; and an ethical seriousness that inscribes what is at stake on

the emotions. The sheer volume and availability of television invite

formulae and familiarity. It requires a rogue imagination to shake

the routines loose, and Troy provided that kind of imagination.

Edge of Darkness embodies an avant-garde sensibility in a popular

thriller, stretching the conventions without quite breaking them, and

pushing on the boundaries of what popular television can do.

Just before his diagnosis with a brain tumour and lung cancer,

Troy delivered four feature-length scripts for the global warming

thriller Broken Light, inspired by James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia.

To be continued...

■ Francis Troy Kennedy Martin, scriptwriter, born 15 February

1932; died 15 September 2009

© Guardian News & Media Ltd 2009

followed by Trinity College Dublin.

According to Ian: ‘Troy’s first plan after national service would

have been the Foreign Office, but he did not have the right back-

ground. He must have picked up the idea that a slim volume of

poetry or novel would get him in.’ A novel was in fact written, Beat

on a Damask Drum (1959), but this was not what kickstarted his

career. ‘Troy wrote an article about boy soldiers in Cyprus and the

BBC asked him to come in and talk about turning it into a play,’ his

brother recalled.

Based on his own experiences during national service as an

officer with the Gordon Highlanders, this became the television

play Incident at Echo 6, screened in 1958. It began a long CV which

is about to become even longer with the release in January of the

Mel Gibson film version of Edge of Darkness. Although Kennedy

Martin did not work on the movie, it is based on his television

series and has the same director, Martin Campbell.

Other films included Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Red Heat (1988),

Hostile Waters (1997) and Red Dust (2004). Two of his Wednesday

Plays went out in 1965 and a five-part adaptation of Angus Wilson’s

The Old Men at the Zoo was transmitted in 1983. He also wrote

episodes of many series such as Redcap and The Sweeney, as well

as the film Sweeney 2 (1978). Two further scripts remain unfilmed:

Troppo, a South Seas environmental thriller, and Ferrari, which

captured the life of the motor racing champion Enzo Ferrari.

‘Very often he wrote ‘spec’ – uncommissioned – scripts,’ recalls

his agent, Elaine Steel. ‘With Edge Of Darkness, the BBC didn’t know

what they were getting. It started out as a thing about the Knights

Templar. When he was talking to aspiring film writers, he would

say that you shouldn’t write to a formula. You should start writing

where you felt like writing, and that might mean starting in the


T elevision is often accused of chasing the

zeitgeist, so those of us who write for television

should wear the scars of the past 18 months with

pride. For, in the current recession, we were the

canary in the coalmine, choking on the toxic fumes of

budget cuts and declining ad revenues. Where we

led, the rest of UK Plc soon followed. Where we go

from here is anybody’s guess.

Paid work dried up as long-running shows were

cancelled and even a ratings-winner like The Bill was

cut back from 100 episodes a year to 50. TV writers

blew the dust off their unfinished novels and spec

screenplays as they waited for the phone to ring.

Broadcast published numerous guides to surviving

the downturn. Bafta hosted a panel discussion on

the crisis in drama.

One thing that everyone has acknowledged

during this, the toughest year that most of us can

remember is that the BBC is the last bastion of

scripted drama.

I don’t feel any blind loyalty towards the BBC – I

abhor the current crackdown on edgy humour

and strong language, and I wish it would stop

pandering to the ban-this-sick-filth brigade. But

the BBC dominates British scripted comedy and

drama because it is the only major broadcaster

with a serious commitment to making it. And it has

a dominant online presence because it was the

only British broadcaster to anticipate the rise of the

internet, and to invest properly in its website.

Attacking the BBC for its failures is fair enough,

but we have to make sure we speak up when it’s

attacked not for failure but for success. In many

respects, the spotlight should really be on the

decisions made by the BBC’s commercial rivals.

At the time of writing, the shortlist for the Writers’

Guild Awards had just been published; by the time

you read this, the results will have been announced.

The venue for this year’s award ceremony is the Free

Word Centre in The Guardian’s old archive building in

Clerkenwell. This part of London was once the home

of medieval scribes – the eponymous clerks – and

is now a hub for new media firms building a brave

creative world online.

While television seems paralysed by fear of

the future, that future is, in fact, already here. Fans

of ancient geek history will remember the day the

first dotcom bubble burst in March 2000 – wiping

out $5 trillion in paper profits worldwide, in just 18

months. Yet more than 50% of dotcoms lived to fight

another day, and one of the lessons they learned

was that content is king. Commercial television could

learn a lot from its online rivals.

That lesson isn’t ‘Hey, let’s buy an overvalued

site called Friends Reunited, then sell it at a massive

loss’(mentioning no names, ITV), it’s that when

you’re in a funding hole, it’s a bad idea to save

money by cutting back on making programmes.

The other lesson ITV could learn is to read the

online fan sites – it might be pleasantly surprised.

Because when ITV does condescend to make new

scripted comedy or drama – Benidorm, Primeval,

Lost In Austen or Murderland – it does it very well.

Meanwhile, the Guild continues doing what it

does best: ensuring that writers’ rights are properly

defended in the brave new digital world, with new

guidelines for writers working in animation, online

drama and online content. In October, the new

good practice guide for film writers and producers

was unveiled at the Screenwriters’ Festival in

Cheltenham, and the revised good practice guide for

television writers also went live. Plans are under way

to launch a new book-publishing co-op for Guild

members. We continue to negotiate better rates

for writers in theatre, radio and television – a major

accomplishment in a difficult year.

A few years ago, the midwife who delivered

my daughter tried to reassure me by describing

a contraction as ‘necessary pain’. I nodded in

agreement at the time, but only because I wanted

another shot of diamorphine. In retrospect, of

course, I can see that she was right. And perhaps

television’s current crisis is another form of

necessary pain.

The television industry has to stop ignoring

the online world, and it has to stop finding it so

terrifying. If it wants to compete, then it has to get

back to doing what it does best – making decent

programmes – and it has to adapt to a future that’s

not just multi-channel but multi-platform.

It needs to remember what internet entrepre-

neurs found out the hard way in the dotcom crash:

no matter how big or small your budget, content is

the only thing that matters.

■ Edel Brosnan

writes for radio and

television. She is Chair

of the Guild’s Editorial

and Communications

Committee

Necessary pain

More than 50% of dotcoms lived to fight another day, and one of the lessons they learned was that content is king. Commercial television could learn a lot from its online rivals


■ Julian Friedmann

is editor of

TwelvePoint.com

and an agent at

Blake Friedmann

Literary Agency

Julian Friedmann

JULIAN FRIEDMANN

W hen I look back at my years on the Executive

Council (EC) of the Guild, the abiding

memory is of the regular discussions about how to

attract well-established writers who did not belong

to the Guild.

This difficult challenge still needs to be faced.

Is it that the Guild does not serve their needs? Is

it that the fees are too high for those writers earning

very well? They almost all have agents whom, it is

said, take care of business for their clients – so why,

they might wonder, pay a kind of commission to an

organisation to which their agents might not deem it

important to belong?

I have never been a trade unionist, in that I have

never been someone who believes in the sanctity of

trade unions. They have their role; in some industries

they were the only means by which the workers, the

so-called ‘disenfranchised’, could gain a semblance

of security. During the Thatcher years they were

perhaps more effective than during the Blair/Brown

years. Perhaps their time is about to come again.

However, when it comes to freelancers and

vulnerable individuals who are, frankly, at the mercy

of buyers in this extreme buyers’ market, unions such

as the Writers’ Guild have a vital role to play even if

some writers don’t realise it.

In my time on the EC I watched the Guild manage

the relationship between writers and the TV broad-

casters superbly, ensuring that all writers were able

to get regular increases and better contracts. It still

did not stop many complaints about ill-treatment,

especially on soaps and series – but here, too, the

Guild is campaigning to improve matters.

In film it was another matter; the producers

effectively refused to come to the table. Fortunately

the Guild’s Film Committee, led ably by Olivia

Hetreed, have come up with a stimulating document

– the Writing Film good practice guide – that should

lead to a far more rational discussion about how

writers and producers could relate to each other,

recognising that once an agreement between them

is made they are both on the same side, trying to

make the best film they could.

Yet, while the Guild has moved forward in devel-

oping agreements and guidelines that benefit writers,

the anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of

career writers in TV and film are in decline.

TV work is getting harder to come by as drama

and comedy budgets contract. And film budgets

are dropping lower and lower so that the recom-

mended 2.5% of the budget for the writer’s fee

is often on a par with the fee for an episode of

EastEnders.

The turbulent economic times we are living

through are undoubtedly having an effect – for

many writers 2009 has been an annus horribilis.

So what’s a writer to do? At this year’s

Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival, there were more

sessions than ever about the mechanics of surviving

as a business person, covering areas such as tax,

negotiating skills, PR, websites, networking and ways

of earning a living by diversifying your writing output.

These sessions were packed out, not only with

newcomers. Several established writers told me that

they needed to talk to their agents about changing

some of the deal structures they were used to

signing. Others were surprised by the passion of PR

queen Kate Adamson who explained why and how

writers could improve their status by better use of

social networks and other techniques.

So Cheltenham worked as well for the experi-

enced writer as for the newcomer: that is why there

were 80 sessions in four

days, more than any one

person could attend,

with some geared to

leading writers.

However, no matter

what individual writers

can do by themselves, ‘I’m all right Jack’ is not really

that useful when recession strike. Writers can and

should unite as powerfully as possible.

Which brings me neatly back to those high

earners who have not yet joined the Guild.

The experience they can bring as members will

add to the Guild’s gravitas and increase its ability to

improve conditions for writers. Joining is, therefore, in

their self-interest. They should not be relying on their

peers, or even worse, new writers, barely earning

anything, to enable the Guild to continue its work.

The Guild’s recruitment campaign over the past

year or so, led by David Edgar, has been a real

success. In theatre, a number of big names who

were not members have seen the light and joined up.

But in TV and film there are still too many absentees.

Not joining the only organisation capable of

improving the terms and conditions for scriptwriters

is, it seems to me, a sublimely irrational act.

You’re not all right, Jack

When it comes to freelancers and

vulnerable individuals who are at the

mercy of buyers in this extreme buyers’

market, unions such as the Writers’

Guild have a vital role to play


THE ARCHERS

‘You’re writing what?’ I couldn’t understand

why people were so surprised that there was

a book to be written based entirely on the archives

of The Archers – to me it wasn’t just an interesting

idea, but an obvious one: a ‘Miscellany’ of what had

been established about Ambridge and its inhabit-

ants over nearly 60 years.

When I started work on the production team in

1980, The Archers continuity system was typed and

handwritten on thousands of index cards (20,000, in

fact). They were kept in a set of miniature wooden

filing drawers with domed brass handles, labelled

with such things as : ‘Characters living: A ’ (there

were a lot of As, obviously) or, more ominously,

‘Dead and Gone’.

The cards had been the idea of the programme’s

first production assistant back in 1951. In those

days there were only two writers – not much room

for confusion, you’d think. But guess what ? Writers,

though following agreed storylines, have a nasty

habit of making things up.

Writer One had patriarch Dan Archer announce

that his favourite meal was steak and kidney pie;

Writer Two had him favouring chicken and leek. The

only solution was to record not just major events – a

plane crashing into Dan’s barley or Phil’s romance

with Grace – but also the fact that Dan smoked a

pipe, was vice-president of the cricket club and

always wore a nightshirt, never pyjamas.

I goggled at all this information. I’d come to

The Archers late: it wasn’t a listening habit in my

childhood, partly because we’d lived abroad. I first

heard the programme at university, when I shared a

house with people who’d grown up on it and who,

away from parents and the dreaded conformity they

represented, now found it a sort of comfort blanket.

At first I had little sense of the significance of the

Archers writer Jo Toye explains how her passion for the programme led her to write the first ever ‘Miscellany’ of the show

first script I worked on in studio – the death of Doris,

mother of Phil, mother-in-law of Peggy and ‘Gran’ to

the rising generation of Shula, David, and Elizabeth

(Kenton was away at sea and rarely heard). But I

soon realised. A distraught listener phoned to ask

where to send the wreath and when a DJ from a mid-

Western radio station (the news had spread across

the Atlantic), started ringing up for a daily update on

Ambridge events, such as the fallout over the pickled

walnuts in that year’s Flower and Produce Show.

(These bizarre conversations continued for more

than a month, until the day John Lennon was shot, on

December 8, 1980. Unaccountably, that was deemed

a more pressing story.)

After four years, by now steeped in The Archers,

I wrote a trial script anonymously and put it on the

editor’s desk. When a writer left the following spring,

I joined the writing team and soon had the joy of

adding to the archive myself. Nigel was up to high

jinks in his gorilla suit, as Mr Snowy the ice-cream

vendor and as a swimming-pool salesman; Eddie

released a country and western record, got involved

in a shampoo-bottling scam with Nelson Gabriel and

was sick in the Bull’s piano. And I got a royal commis-

sion when, hearing that the Duke of Westminster was

to appear as himself at a Grey Gables charity fashion

show, Princess Margaret wanted in on the fun, too.

Over the years I’ve been writing, the storylines

have dealt with every possible human drama –

love, death, betrayal, jealousy, births, deaths and

marriages of course, but also rape and its aftermath,

racism, drug use, abortion and criminal justice. The

tensions of family life under stress from illness, young

children, elderly parents, too much or too little work

and lack of money, opportunity or housing have to

be interwoven with cows with bloat, Brookfield’s

new pasture system, and the boardroom machi-

nations at Borchester Land. Meanwhile the fete,

Flower and Produce Show, Harvest Supper and the

Christmas production all have to be set up, run up

to and have a new twist added – all in individual

episodes lasting just 12½ minutes, containing

two or three main stories and multiple ‘mentions’,

and using on average five or six scenes and six or

seven characters.

UNDERNEATH THE ARCHERSBehind the scenes of the world’s longest-running radio soap as it prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary next year

The delight is in the details

■ The Archers

Miscellany by Joanna

Toye is published by

BBC Books, priced £9.99

■ The Archers is

broadcast Sunday –

Friday on BBC Radio 4

at 7pm with a repeat at

2pm the next day. There

is a Sunday omnibus

from 10 – 11.15am. It

can also be heard online

on the BBC iPlayer.


In 1994, I wrote the first of five Archers novelisa-

tions, including a trilogy retelling the main storylines

from 1951-2000 for the programme’s 50th anniver-

sary. In 2001, I co-wrote The Archers Encyclopaedia.

As we edited and compressed a vast amount of

information to fit the word count, the value of the

archive impressed itself on me again.

What grieved me was the neglect of this potential

Tutankhamun’s tomb of information. Some of its

treasures do, it’s true, make it on air – everything from

the reason for Shula and Usha’s latent mutual resent-

ment, to Lynda’s previous battles over footpaths. But

thousands more little gems are buried away: unless I

excavated them they might simply be forgotten.

Perhaps you could have lived without knowing

that Bert and Freda Fry bought their Ewbank

carpet sweeper together when Argos first opened

in Felpersham, but as the Howard Carter of The

Archers, I feel I have a duty to bring it to your

attention. Want to know the design of the floral

carpet that graced St Stephen’s one year? It’s

in the book, complete with a sort of ‘paint-by-

numbers’ illustration of the red cow of St Modwena.

Interested in the varieties of soup served at

Brookfield harvest picnics? See Page 111.

Digging through the archive presented joys

and sorrows. The joy of finding, in full, Marjorie

Antrobus’s recipe for Yemenite pickle and the fact

that there were so many recorded mentions of

Nigel’s jackets that they merited an entry of their

own had to be set against the frustration of the ‘lost

years’ of the fete and Flower and Produce Show and

the detective work needed to fill in the gaps.

More recent years – the archive only started to

be computerised in 1994 – presented a different

challenge. I risked being buried in – or possibly, if I

printed it off, by – the sheer volume of information

that could now be stored.

What charmed me above all, though, was the

care with which it had all been crafted, and it made

me realise why, quite apart from the challenges it

sets the writer, I love the programme so.

Way back in time, a scriptwriter had once written,

for whatever reason – perhaps it was a salient plot

point, or it demonstrated a deep-seated character

trait, or perhaps it was just an expression of a

personal aversion – that Phil had refused a meringue.

Not just that, but someone else had bothered to

write it down.

This kind of attention to detail is what has made

The Archers a complete, authentic and believable

world – and has to be part of the reason for its

success.

ARCHERS TIMELINE1950 Whit week: trial week of episodes broadcast in Midland region only.

1951 January 1: national transmission begins, initially for a six-week run.

1955 Phil Archer’s young wife Grace dies in a stable fire in an episode that coincides with the opening night of ITV television network – 20 million listeners mourn.

1957 Phil marries Jill – the Brookfield dynasty will continue!

1967 Peggy and Jack’s daughter, Jennifer, has illegitimate baby, Adam. Father not named.

1967 Borchester mail van robbery.

1971 The show’s founding editor, Godfrey Baseley, retires.

1976 William Smethurst joins writing team. Later, as editor, he reintroduced Nelson Gabriel, introduced Nigel Pargetter, Caroline Bone (now Sterling) and the Grundys and focused on Brookfield’s new generation: Kenton, Shula, David and Elizabeth.

1980 Doris dies.

1986 Dan dies.

1991 Editor Vanessa Whitburn joins. She casts Debbie and brings in an Asian solicitor, Usha

1993 Susan Carter jailed for attempting to pervert the course of justice for hiding her criminal brother Clive. This leads to the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, being questioned about the number of women in prison.

1994 Shula’s husband, Mark, killed in car crash, leaving Shula pregnant following IVF treatment.

2000 Phil retires, prompting inheritance wrangles. David takes over Brookfield.

2001 David’s wife, Ruth, survives breast cancer.

2002 Ruairi, the product of an affair between Jennifer’s husband, Brian, and Siobhan Hathaway, born. Siobhan later dies; Jennifer agrees to take on Ruairi.

2006 Civil partnership ceremony for Adam and his partner, Ian Craig.

2009 Current stories include fraudulent dealings of Lilian’s partner, Matt; Jack Woolley’s Alzheimer’s; proposal for a community shop. Cast characters now number 70, with numerous ‘unheards’.

11996: Pebble Mill studio


Writing The ArchersTHE ARCHERS

Mary Cutler

I’d always been an Archers listener, from when

I was a tiny child. It was my first experience of

drama. I remember where I was when Grace Archer

died – standing on a chair with my ear pressed to

our crackly radio, sunshine flooding into the room,

and me thinking: ‘No, they can’t do that!’

I remember the particularly horrible thudding

sound of the machine that stunned the cows

before they were slaughtered when Dan’s herd

was devastated by foot and mouth. I was devas-

tated too – I checked in Jo Toye’s invaluable and

delightful Miscellany to see how old I was when

this disaster had taken place and found I was four.

There were happier consequences of my parents’

Archers addiction. When we drove out from our

Birmingham suburb – just a village in Worcestershire

when my father was born – into the neighbouring

countryside, we were firmly in Borsetshire. We’d play

at naming appropriate buildings: that country house

hotel Grey Gables, that old farmhouse Brookfield. I

invented a new game to play with my three small

brothers. I was Phil Archer. They were his pigs.

Time passed. I wanted to be a writer and as a

teenager sold some stories to Jackie magazine (I

bought my winter coat to go up to university with

the last one). I was going to be a novelist, except

what I ended up writing was my autobiography

and I doubted that it would sell.

I decided that being a writer was a fantasy and

Chris Thompson

I attended my first Archers script conference

at Pebble Mill in December 1993. I already

had experience as a professional writer, having

written several radio plays and cut my TV teeth on

the daytime soap Families. But this was different,

this was The Archers. The Crown Jewels.

I had given up my secondary-school deputy

headship in 1989 and regarded myself as a

full-time writer. But 1993 had been a bad year

and I had briefly returned to the classroom as

a supply teacher, thinking maybe I’d had my

moment in the dimly lit spotlight and would

have to return to the day job.

During the previous 10 years I had applied

twice to The Archers and received no reply (the

producers in question shall remain nameless)

but this time, having written a trial script

involving Linda Snell and a facial rash, I got lucky,

met Vanessa Whitburn and Jo Toye, and was

invited to join the team.

And so on that December day I entered

the conference room on the sixth floor, to be

greeted by the woman whom I was replacing on

the team. Not an auspicious start, but she was

sweet about it and life went on. The other writers

drifted in and I took my place at the table, where

I was confronted by the agenda. Item one was

entitled ‘The Big One’. I turned the page to find

to my horror that The Big One was Mark Hebden

meeting a sticky end at the wheel of his car. ‘No!’

I screamed inwardly. ‘You can’t kill Mark. What

about poor Shula?’ I glanced up, expecting my

fellow writers to be looking as shocked as I felt.

But, of course, they were discussing the perils of

using mobile phones while driving, in a matter-of-

fact way. (Typically, a story way ahead of its time.)

And then it dawned. I was being offered the

power of life and death over characters I had

listened to since childhood. It was an awesome

moment. Once Mark had been dispatched,

however, we moved on to the Grundys and I

experienced my second epiphany. I could come

up with scams and shenanigans for the Grundys

and get paid for it! What joy it was to be alive!

As I sat there, the winter sunlight flickering

in at the window, smiling both inside and out, I

heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter

approaching, and was told that it was Noel

Edmonds arriving to record his show. Truly, I

had died and gone to heaven … aka Ambridge,

where I stayed for four of the happiest years of

my writing career.

And I never did go back to the day job.

ARCHERS MISCELLANY

■ The sound of a gate closing is made by collapsing an ironing board.

■ Celebrities who have played themselves in the programme include Sir Terry Wogan, Alan Titchmarsh, John Peel, Britt Ekland, Dame Edna Everage and, most recently, the artist Antony Gormley.

Three writers recall their time scripting Ambridge life

11957: Alan Rothwell as Jimmy Grange

11984: Outside recording at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

Truly, I had died and gone to heaven … aka Ambridge, where I stayed for four of the happiest years of my writing career. And I never did go back to the day job.


Michael Bartlett

I was briefly one of The Archers writing team in

the mid-1980s and it was great fun, even if the

schedule was somewhat demanding.

I had been writing radio and television plays

since the early 1970s, but being part of a writing

team was a very different process. I was used to

more freedom; even if I had a commission with

a delivery date, I still had quite a lot of control

over how I used my time.

I found the discipline of having to write so

much at a fairly fast pace and ensuring that it

slotted into other people’s work exhilarating,

challenging and, ultimately, limiting – for me

personally, that is.

Having said that, the thing I enjoyed most

was the teamwork. Sitting around a table with

fellow professionals, sharing ideas, bouncing

things off each other and jointly developing

storylines and characters gave me a great buzz.

Ironically, when it came to the writing, those

plus points were the things that gave me the

most trouble. I have always been what one

critic once called ‘an amusing, quirky writer’

but working as part of a team, especially on

something as well established as The Archers,

meant that there was little room for ‘quirky’;

though ‘amusing’ could often be fitted in.

I had to learn to rein in my flights of fancy,

I had to learn to write for other people’s

characters, but perhaps the best lesson I

learned – and one I carried forward into my

post-Archers writing life – was economy. To

some extent this is something that every radio

writer, or at least every good one, learns very

early on. ‘Less is more,’ as the saying goes. But

writing pre-planned storylines for a 13-minute

slot sharpens that skill and I am still grateful for

the experience.

At the time I was writing for The Archers I

was living in a large town just outside London.

I had never lived in the country and the

agricultural learning curve was steep. Without

the production team’s special adviser I would

have been floundering.

Now, many years later, I live in a tiny Norfolk

village in the middle of a farming community and

I know, though still at second hand, a lot more

about farming.

I am still a regular listener to the programme

and I love the reality of village life, but living

here has opened my eyes. Until I moved into this

village I always believed that The Archers was

fiction. Now I know that it is not.

ARCHERS MISCELLANY

■ Norman Painting, who played Phil, was the longest-serving actor in any one role in the world. He died aged 85 in October.

■ June Spencer (Peggy) was also in the original episode.

■ The sound of a lamb being born is actually someone squelching yogurt in their hands, followed by a wet tea towel being dropped on discarded recording tape.

concentrated on my actual career in teaching. Only

I couldn’t quite stop writing. A friend idly remarked

that he was surprised I hadn’t tried writing plays.

The floodgates opened. I loved writing dialogue. I

found plays much easier to structure than novels.

I started sending my plays to the best market:

radio. I got them back: sometimes with a standard

letter, sometimes an encouraging one. Once I

even got to meet a radio producer. But I was still a

teacher when one of my old school friends beat

me to it and started to write for The Archers.

Naturally I was fascinated by her first broad-

casts. Though it was recognisably The Archers, it

sounded like her, too. I wondered what I would

find out about my style if I tried writing an episode.

So on Friday evening, after a hard week at school,

while my young daughter watched Flambards, I

wrote, just for fun, the Monday episode to follow

my friend’s Friday one. And it was fun. I didn’t

know this, but the Archers structure had got into

my brain. I instinctively wrote seven characters in

five scenes – standard for the time. I was told later

that the first decent line was two thirds of the way

down the first page. It was, too:

‘Neil: [talking of Eva, the au pair] She can get up

a far lick of speed when she’s pushed.’

But who told me this? What happened to the

script? How did I become an Archers writer?

Well, I have to end with a cliff-hanger, don’t I?

Dum de dum de dum de dum...

11957: Alan Rothwell as Jimmy Grange

11984: Outside recording at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

I am still a regular listener to the programme

and I love the reality of village life, but living

here has opened my eyes. Until I moved into

this village I always believed that The Archers

was fiction. Now I know that it is not.


UNDER THE MUD

So there I was with John Travolta, striding down

the red carpet, heading into the Beverly Hills

Hilton Hotel, while trying to suppress a big stupid

grin. He’s the legendary star of Grease, Saturday

Night Fever and Pulp Fiction – I’m the producer of

Under The Mud, a feature film written collaboratively

with a group of Liverpool teenagers that cost just

£45,000 to shoot (less than a month’s fuel bill for

Danny Zucko’s private jet).

Five years earlier, and a few thousand miles

away in the slightly less glamorous South Liverpool

suburb of Garston, Under The Mud started as a

writing workshop at a youth drop-in centre. The area

– politely described as ‘deprived’ – had the highest

rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe, but, despite

potential ‘distractions’, we managed to attract a

group of interested participants. At the first session

I and my fellow producers Sol Papadopoulos

and Julie Currie were disappointed by the group’s

reticence, which we put down to shyness. In fact,

they thought we might be undercover police – who

else would ask them all these questions? The issue

was quickly resolved after the session when my

name came up on the credits of Brookside. We

suddenly had credibility.

Over the following months we assembled a

group of enthusiastic teenage first-time writers and

developed an outline. The story, which The Times

would later describe as ‘an energetic and surreal

account of 24 hours in the life of a dysfunctional

family’, featured characters based on the writers’

friends, families and neighbours. However, it owed

a lot more to the imagination, with its aeroplane

boarding-steps chase sequence, a holy-communion

dress with mechanical fairy wings and an ‘imaginary

friend’ as the central character (based on one of our

From Garston to HollywoodRoy Boulter explains how a

community writing project

resulted in a critically

acclaimed feature film,

Under The Mud

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1 Star spotting (part 1): Roy Boulter with Zac Efron in Hollywood (Roy is

the one on the right)

They thought we might be undercover police – who else would ask them all these questions?


writers’ real imaginary friend).

The story really started to take shape over three

residential writing weekends. We sat around the

table discussing, arguing about and laughing through

every scene, character and plotline. Eventually we

had a 60-page treatment and a story that we were

all happy with.

The problem was how to write dialogue with 15

writers. Improvisation worked well for some scenes

and characters, but not others. We tried working in

groups of two or three on individual scenes, which

I would then give notes on. After countless rewrites,

our production line eventually delivered a final draft

that the actor and director Kathy Burke, an avid

supporter of the project, described as the most

enjoyable script she’d read in a long time.

Next up was the small matter of raising the budget.

This funny little slice of social surrealism had taken two

years to write and now took a further year to fund.

The funding eventually came from drug money.

All the usual sources of funding had proved

fruitless; The Film Council and our local screen

agency both declined to get involved (though they

would eventually invest in the film). But pharma-

ceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), once a major

employer in the area, had just closed down its

factory, leaving behind a social fund, to which we

successfully applied.

We decided that we’d begin pre-production

on April 1 (a deliberate choice) and whatever

amount we had raised by that date would be our

budget. We had the GSK grant and local social

initiatives were also really supportive. For example,

South Liverpool Housing Group provided us

with two houses: one for the main set, the other

for production.

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1Under The Mud writers with Kathy Burke: (left-to-right)Davide Catterall, Tanya Taylor, Natalie Southern, Mick Colligan, Lenny

Wood, Howard Davies, Sophia Barlow

We sat around the table arguing about and laughing through every scene, character and plotline


The three-week shoot was one of the most

exhausting and enjoyable that any of us had ever

experienced. The professional crew were aided by

the writers, members of the community and anyone

else we could rope in. We renovated, decorated

and furnished a derelict church, two houses and

a landscaped garden. A family were able to move

straight into a newly decorated and furnished home

after we’d finished.

Throughout the shoot we had to beg and

borrow. And, though we didn’t actually steal the

‘stolen car’ needed for a scene, it did get us into

trouble. A wrecked car was donated by a local

scrapyard but the police turned up on location

and took it. Apparently it had been pinched that

morning and quickly sold on; the scrapyard had

even smashed it up to look authentic for us. Luckily

the helpful boys in blue provided us with another

car and the crucial night shoot went ahead.

With an eventful shoot completed, more

fundraising meant a long wait before the edit. Then,

thanks to a development executive Marc Boothe

championing the film, the UK Film Council finally

came on board.

Unfortunately, timing issues resulted in us having

to submit a cut to them that we weren’t happy with.

Having the film narrated by the imaginary friend

character, which had seemed so funny and clever at

script stage, just didn’t work. The central focus of the

film was an empty space on screen; it was confusing.

The cut was rejected and with it went hopes

of further funding. The film sat on a shelf for a year

while Sol and I went off to earn some money – Sol

to make an award-winning documentary on the

history of air warfare, and me to write, including

an episode of Jimmy McGovern’s The Street (a

total education).

We eventually reconvened, reinvigorated, and

watched the film with a fresh eye. The year’s break

was the best thing that could have happened. We

had always maintained that the film had no central

character; ‘the family’ was the main character. Wrong.

Only Magic, the family’s unofficial lodger, was

actually pro-active: he fought to keep everyone

together, he set out to ‘win the girl’ and was the

catalyst for almost everything that happened. It was

his story. How clever were we!

Fortunately, the actor playing the role of Magic,

Lenny Wood (also one of the writers), had turned

in a great performance. A day of reshoots resulted

in us book-ending the film with two new scenes,

beautifully setting up and resolving his story. Our

editor, Liza Ryan-Carter, then skilfully reshaped the

film. Thankfully, it worked.

The icing on the ‘mud pie’ was the score

composed by the legendary Pete Wylie of The

Mighty Wah! He also contributed five tracks from

his classic album Songs Of Strength And Heartbreak,

and a further two tracks were provided by my

former band, The Farm.

A selection of additional songs, chosen during

the writing sessions, also needed to be cleared and

though we knew it would be expensive, we decided

to include them as they were key to the story. That

was a decision that would eventually prove costly

but, for now, the film was finally finished and we

were ready to tell the world.

Invitations started coming in from film festivals.

The response from our first, in Victoria, Canada, was

amazing, with the film likened to early Mike Leigh: ‘A

fiercely funny and achingly compelling portrait of a

working class Liverpool family’. Blimey. Several trips

followed – we invited writers whenever we could

raise money or afford to pay for them ourselves.

We visited places as diverse as Northern Ireland,

California, Keswick, Colorado, Cambridge, Cannes

(Sol shot a Royal Television Society award-winning

documentary on that trip), and even Hollywood,

where we rubbed shoulders not just with John (Mr

Travolta to you), but also with Brad Pitt, the Afflecks,

Zac Efron and Michael Sheen.

Back home, things weren’t running so smoothly.

Endless visits to distribution companies resulted in

the same outcome: they loved the film, but with no

big names it would be prohibitively expensive to

market. Getting word to the film’s audience would

be difficult – though they all acknowledged that

it did have an audience, and potentially a big one.

Ultimately, it was too much of a gamble.

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5 Star spotting

(part 2): Under The

Mud writer Mick

Colligan (almost) with

John Travolta

A wrecked car was donated by a local scrapyard but the police turned up on location and took it. Apparently it had been pinched that morning and quickly sold on

UNDER THE MUD


The stunning Liverpool Philharmonic Hall hosted

the premiere, which was followed by a big party.

But with no distribution deal, the film remained

unseen. The Guardian described it as ‘maybe the

best British film you’ll never see’. We were convinced

that it at least warranted a release but we couldn’t

even put it out ourselves since the initial quotes to

clear the music came to nearly double what the film

had cost to shoot.

Another year passed and Sol and I produced

our second feature, Of Time And The City, directed

by Terence Davies, which was a critical hit at Cannes

and around the world and a success at the box

office. The two films couldn’t have been more

different, in every sense.

Fate finally conspired to get Mud released. After

a chance meeting, an old school friend of Sol’s

passed a screener on to an acquaintance who fell in

love with the film and decided to invest in its release.

The first job was to clear that soundtrack. Our

music supervisor from Of Time And The City, the

fantastic Ian Neil, cajoled, harried and charmed the

publishers and record companies, and cut the bill by

two-thirds – but it meant a DVD release only.

And so, more than seven years after the first

writing workshop, Under The Mud is finally available

– although self-distribution, increasingly the only

option for micro-budget UK features, is difficult

and time-consuming, like everything else on this

film. We’re still in touch with the writing team. Some

continue to write, some act and some have just got

on with their lives. But, like us, they are all very proud

of Under The Mud.

■ www.hurricanefilms.net

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1The Potts family in Under The Mud: (left-to-right) Lenny Wood, Lauren Steele, Lisa Parry, Andrew

Schofield, Jasmine Mubery, Dave Hart, Adam Bailey

More than seven years after the first workshop, Under The Mud is finally available


SHORTS

W hen Washdays won Best Film at the Rushes

Soho Shorts Festival this summer it felt like

a vindication. The idea for this film, written by me

and brilliantly directed by Simon Neal, had started

five years ago when I was writing for Doctors, the

continuing drama series on BBC1. To cut to the chase,

it was rejected by my then new script editor, we fell

out over it, I called him something (unprintable here),

and I was sacked from the programme.

But a good idea is never wasted, so it stayed

in my virtual bottom drawer until the autumn of

2007, when I saw a posting on the Shooting People

website from an ‘award-winning commercials

director’ asking for short scripts.

I didn’t have a script, but I did have this idea, so

I emailed him the outline. His response came quickly.

‘I have read over 100 [scripts] in the past few weeks

from an earlier posting on Inktip.com, and I’ve got

to say that Washdays is hands down the best idea I

have received. It’s a beautiful character study of the

little boy, and that moment when his mum realises

what it is that her son has stolen, the mixture of

emotions that she and the audience will feel; I don’t

think you can ask for anything more from a script,

short or otherwise.’

Flattered isn’t the word! I can’t speak for others,

but that kind of praise is what gets this writer out of

bed for the other 364 days of the year. And once we

got down to discussions and I learned that Simon

intended to shoot on 35mm, I wrote the first draft

borne aloft on angel’s wings. The first draft of many.

But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself here. The

first thing we did was draw up a contract. Although

The long road to a short filmGraham Lester George on writing Washdays


this was a no-pay gig – or more accurately a

‘possibly jam tomorrow’ gig – there were other issues

to be addressed at a professional level, licensing the

use of the script and our respective credits. With

the very generous (given that there was nothing in

it for him) help of my agent, Julian Friedmann, we

reached a formal agreement for a one picture deal

and equal credit.

With those important matters finalised, we

discussed possible locations: the first was Somers

Town (before Shane Meadows got there), looking at

the possibilities that the housing estate, the canal and

whole King’s Cross area could offer. Ramsgate was

another, with its coastal setting and Dreamland, the

recently closed fun-fair site.

Each of these generated several script drafts.

But finally Simon happened to drive past the Alton

Estate in Roehampton. A 1960s-built mixture of

high- and low-rise, conceived, with all the misplaced

idealism of its time, from the seeds of Le Corbusier’s

arrogant theories about how people should live.

The long road to a short film

This was the place. We were now into late spring

2008 and, armed with photographs supplied by

Simon, and images from Google Earth to give me

a sense of the place, I wrote further drafts based

around the possibilities that the now final choice of

location offered.

At one stage the script was running at 16 pages,

but as the pre-production planning got under way,

it became clear to Simon (who was funding the film

from his own money) that a 10-minute film shot on

35mm was all he could stretch to.

His notes had hitherto been thoughtful and

logical, but now they became brutal as he hacked

away at my favourite scenes, most loved charac-

ters and treasured dialogue. It was painful. But

as I mentioned before, Simon is a commercials

director, and one thing commercials directors are

better at than most is brevity. Telling a story in 30

to 40 seconds takes great skill and discipline. By

comparison 10 minutes must have felt almost like a

feature. I trusted him and it paid off. By the end of

the process my script was eight pages long – half its

original length – and as tight as a drum.

Shooting was scheduled for the last three

days of August 2008, but there was small problem

remaining; the right boy to play Kyle, the lead

part, had not been found by the week before the

camera was due to roll. The shoot would have to

be postponed unless a minor miracle happened.

Luckily one did. An 11-year-old by the name of

Kieran Dooner turned up at Simon’s office to

audition on the Tuesday and was, as can be seen in

the finished film, a perfect fit for the part.

I was on location for the whole of the shoot,

both as writer and as the stills photographer, and

it was a terrific experience. The atmosphere and

relations between all members of the highly profes-

sional cast and crew was excellent.

Special mention must go to the aformentioned

Kieran Dooner, who I believe has a great natural

talent for screen acting. To Carys Lewis, who played

Chris, his mum, superbly. To Simon, who directed

brilliantly. To the director of photography Nic Morris

BSC, who shot the film beautifully. And last but not

least Dan Cleland, of Another Film Company, who

did a terrific job producing.

As well as winning Rushes Soho, Washdays was

recently awarded Silver in The Smalls Film Festival,

and has been Officially Selected for several events

including the Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol

and the New Orleans Film Festival . It is also eligible

for submission to Bafta for this season’s Short Film

award, so fingers crossed.1Kieran Dooner in

Washdays


THE WRITER-DIRECTOR

Born and brought up in Northern Ireland, writer-

director Maeve Murphy co-founded theatre

company Trouble And Strife before moving into film.

Her first feature, Silent Grace, was released in 2004

and her second as writer-director, Beyond The Fire,

won the Best UK Feature award at this year’s London

Independent Film Festival.

UK Writer: Congratulations on winning the

Best UK Feature award for Beyond The Fire. It

must have been great to get such recognition.

Maeve Murphy: Thanks – yes, it was

fantastic to win. The film has dominated

my life for a while now. It really is genuinely

independent, with no money from any of

the established funding structures until a

grant from the UK Film Council right at the

end. In many ways it was the indie dream:

making the film I wanted, in the way that I

wanted and then ending up picking up a

prize at a film festival.

How did the film come about?

I started developing it with an American

producer, Dean Silvers, which is partly why

we weren’t well-positioned to get UK and

Irish funding. So, once the script was written,

we started by shooting for one day, then

showed the footage to financiers to get more

funding. We ended up making the film in three

shoots over the course of about 18 months.

1 Silent Grace

1Maeve Murphy

UK Writer meets the writer-director of the award-winning Beyond The Fire

How did it feel when you finally had

the first public screening?

Really frightening! It was at the Curzon in Mayfair

and the place was packed. Fortunately the film

went down well but it was noticeable that people

wanted to talk mostly about the style of the film

rather than the subject matter. It’s a love story

about two people who have been raped and

I sensed that the audience after the screening

were shying away from the subject matter.

However, in May this year, the Ryan report

– looking into child abuse in institutions in

Ireland – was published and since one of

my characters, Sheamy, had been raped as a

boy by an Irish priest, there was suddenly a

lot of focus on that aspect of the film.

How did you approach that subject

matter when you were writing?

I decided that I didn’t want to involve any

children in flashback scenes. I was worried

that, even if nothing was shown, just to

involve them in the film might somehow

be exploitative. The question for me was

how we can remain compassionate and humane

while also seeking justice. I didn’t realise when I

was writing or directing the film that it would prove

It was the indie dream


controversial, but at the end there’s a scene when

the man forgives the priest who raped him, and that

has caused a lot of strong reactions.

Has the film been shown in Ireland?

It’s been shown in Northern Ireland and will be

screened at the Irish Film Centre in Dublin towards

the end of this year. After a screening in Belfast I

did a Q&A that was also broadcast on BBC Radio

Ulster. It was just after the Ryan report had been

published and there was almost a lynch-mob

mentality towards people who had committed

crimes against children. And there were people who

didn’t like the fact that Beyond The Fire ends with

forgiveness. For me the film’s ending, while showing

the tragic institutional failure of the Church to deal

with the paedophile crisis, represents a moment of

personal resolution for Sheamy. He finds a way to

move forward and let go of the past by forgiving

his abuser. He is no longer carrying hatred in his

heart and has broken the cycle of abuse. However,

like many victims, he is not taking Father Brendan to

court. This is a reality, however hard it is to stomach.

Katie, the other lead, does go through the legal

process, and gets a conviction against the man who

raped her, but Sheamy chooses not to. The film

closes with some of the shocking statistics about the

scale of the abuse that has taken place.

You started off in theatre – how did

you make the move into film?

Even when I was co-writing plays with Trouble And

Strife, I knew I wanted to make films. I self-financed

1 Scot Williams and Cara Seymour in Beyond The Fire

my first short, Kiss, and that became a calling card

when I went looking for finance for my second. Like

much of my work, people either seemed to love it or

hate it, but it got into some film festivals and some

people at the British Film Institute liked it – they

awarded me the money for the next one.

Were you conscious of trying to make

shorts that would attract attention and

money to help you to build a career?

Not at all. I’ve always just made the films I wanted

to make. By the time I’d got a few shorts under my

belt I was well-known enough to get some funding

together for a feature, Silent Grace. We didn’t have

enough money to finish it when we started filming

but we managed to get a completion grant from

the Irish Film Board to see us through. In some ways

Beyond The Fire was like starting all over again, since

it was my first feature film in England.

Like most independent film-makers you’ve

clearly had to spend a lot of time getting

funding for films and then promoting

them – does that frustrate you?

It’s not ideal. I’ve been a producer on both my

features, out of necessity. But I’d like to drop that if I

can. It just takes up too much time.

And what about your next projects?

I’ve got several films in development, both as a

writer-director and just as a director. I’m not in any

rush, I just want to make the films I want to make.

■ Full details: maevemurphy.net

■ Beyond The Fire is

available on DVD from

lovefilm.com

Even when I was co-writing plays, I knew I wanted to make films


GETTING IT MADE

I’m a writer based in the north east of Scotland. As

well as writing a clutch of short films, I’ve taken

feature film projects to Moonstone Screenwriters Lab

and SOURCES2 European Scriptwriting Workshops

and been selected for a BBC Radio Drama Masterclass.

In 2001, my script Smith was shortlisted for the

Tartan Shorts scheme run by BBC Scotland and

Scottish Screen but didn’t make the final selection.

Seven years later I passed it to Carly Bowie who had

recently completed a film course at Aberdeen College

The script was 13 pages long, with only three

lines of dialogue – my idea was to make an almost

silent movie, not a talkie. Carly was convinced that

we could do it.

Had it been made as a Tartan Short, the film would

have had a budget of between £45,000 and £60,000.

As it was, we had a budget based on goodwill.

Our first decision was to make the film in our

hometown, Fraserburgh. That cut out travel and

accommodation costs.

The next question was casting. Smith is about an

old man who is terrorised by a group of youths – it’s

a modern morality tale. So, first off, we needed to

find our Smith.

Henry Duthie MBE is 85 years old. For many

years he has been involved with the Fraserburgh

Junior Arts Society, an amateur dramatic group that

has a reputation for putting on quality stage shows.

He’d been kind enough to read some of my work in

the past, so I went to see him. After all, when you

live in a relatively isolated place, you have to have

a network of people who will give you feedback.

Henry was someone whose opinion I valued.

We met and discussed the script and then I just

asked him if he would be Smith and if we could use

his house for filming. He replied ‘yes’ to both.

Now we had to get hold of a camera and crew

and the additional cast.

We got support from the local arts officer with

Aberdeenshire Council and their Media Unit but the

most difficult thing was tracking down the members

of the gang.

Getting these young guys to agree to take part

was a worry. We had a few who said that they were

interested then fell away. Finally, Carly collared a

young punk band who said they were up for it. Carly

and I then approached shop owners, a local Post

Office and the Royal British Legion for the story’s

locations.

The most daunting thing was the realisation that

the buck stopped with me. From being a writer, I

had become, by default, the producer, director,

runner, driver, sandwich-maker and general stand in

– as had Carly.

Filmmaking in Fraserburgh

How I filed away the rejection

letters and started

making films, by Mark Jackson

5 Henry Duthie as

Smith

1Mark Jackson: It’s been a steep learning curve


We worked out the shooting schedule. It was to

be a three-day shoot: 6am to midnight.

It was hard on everyone but Henry was incred-

ible. He was full of suggestions and kept telling the

rest of the young cast that he was basing his perfor-

mance on Tyrone Power. To their credit, they quickly

found out who Power was.

The main worry was a simple one: would

everyone turn up and remember what they had

agreed to do?

Unfortunately, the first day of the shoot did not

get off to a good start.

The first two choices of locations were poor

ones. There were too many cars and too many

people watching, and the pavements were too

narrow to allow the crew to work properly.

This was the opening morning, and by 9am I was

standing in the middle of the set, with people asking

me questions that I did not know the answer to.

But that passed quickly. It had to.

Smith was made with a crew of four: me, Carly,

Lorna Berridge on camera and Ben Barrett doing

sound. As the day went on, we began to click. We

were new to this and new to each other, but as a

team we began to dovetail.

And as we worked and became smoother, I

began to realise that what had started out as words

on my laptop was now taking shape. With that came

the realisation that in writing the script I had over-

looked a number of crucial elements.

A couple of times, I had to fight down panic, as

I realised that we did not have the capability to get

certain shots. We had to improvise as well as we could.

While I realised some of the problems as we shot, far

more was revealed when we got into the editing suite.

Editing took six days and was a real eye-opener

for me. For every pat on the back you allow yourself,

there are at least three laments. You promise yourself

that if you get to make another film you will not make

the same mistakes. In the edit you get to change your

mind about how you are telling the story, or you get

it changed for you.

Once we had a final cut, including an original

theme soundtrack, we had to decide what to do with

Smith. The costs had started to mount. Professional-

quality copies of the film were needed but they cost

money. As does submitting to film festivals.

We were very fortunate that the first Aberdeen

City and Shire Film Festival was held in July, so Smith

was premiered there, alongside Scott Graham’s Shell

and Born To Run.

In November 2009, Smith was also screened as a

preview film before one of the feature presentations

at the Inverness Film Festival.

We are still submitting the film to festivals, as

short films appear to have only short shelf lives.

More importantly, Carly and I are building on

what we’ve learned. We shot another film, Stoked,

in October and were much more specific about our

requirements during shooting.

Unlike Smith, Stoked was written with

Fraserburgh in mind: the fishing harbour, the charac-

ters, the caravan park and the beautiful beach.

The shoot was longer and the crew bigger, but

we stuck with a small cast. Because so much of the

shoot was weather-dependent, we all held our

collective breath as the day approached, but our

luck held and the shoot went well. The aim is to make

a stronger film that is more fluid – it’s about surfers in

the north east of Scotland so it needs that quality.

A very experienced writer once told me that, as

a writer, you need to get stuff made. I have tried

to take that advice to heart. We’ll be making a third

short film soon.

Smith and Stoked have taught me a lot, but it has

been a steep learning curve.

It also enabled a group of people to be involved

in making a film who otherwise would not have

been. That is no small thing. The benefits have been

considerable and not just for me as the writer.

We have had a lot of support; Aberdeenshire

Council and many local people and businesses have

chipped in to enable us to get these two films made.

Of course, I will still keep sending off my feature

scripts and file away the rejections and the ‘Dear

Mark’ letters, but, in the meantime, I hope to make

another short film and keep telling stories.

1The cast and crew

of Stoked

A very experienced writer once told me that, as a writer, you need to get stuff made. I have tried to take that advice to heart. We’ll be making a third short film soon


POETRY IN SCHOOLS

I t all started more or less by chance. I’d been

teaching English for seven years and had just

had my first pamphlet of poems published. I was

booked to do a reading, which was funded by the

Poetry Society, and was sent a questionnaire. In

the ‘Further comments’ section I said that I’d be

interested in joining the Poets in Schools scheme.

This was funded by WH Smith and a school got two

poets for two days for free.

A year went by, then one day I got a call asking

me if I’d like to work with the poet Pete Morgan

in a school in Cumbria. I already knew Pete – no

worries about getting on with my co-worker – so

it was just a matter of getting time off school to go.

No problem there either. THAT woman had been

Prime Minister for only three years, unions were still a

force to be reckoned with and the only people who

‘delivered’ were the Post Office and the local dairy. I

agreed to give up my next 16 free periods and run

the bookstall at the Christmas Fair and, in return, the

time off was granted.

I learned a lot. Pete was a joy to work with. The

children were primed and the teachers all knew

poetry mattered. Nobody used the word ‘text’.

The only disappointment, apparently, was me. The

children didn’t think I looked like a poet. It was my

first booking so I’d actually had a haircut and was

wearing my best jacket and a collar and tie. I didn’t

make that mistake again.

I carried on with the Poets in School scheme

until it was finally wound up. I can’t remember the

official reason WH Smith gave, but I suspected that

some accountant thought it wasn’t profitable and

was therefore worthless. I was sorry to see it end,

but it had helped me in a number of ways. I was

now getting enough work from schools to be able

to change from full-time to part-time teaching and I’d

started writing for children myself.

Usborne Books had asked the Poetry Society

for a list of poets who might want to contribute

to a new anthology of poems for children. And it

wanted new poems, not reprints of work by people

who’ve been dead long enough it isn’t necessary to

pay anyone to reproduce their work.

‘Writing poems for kids,’ I thought. ‘Easy.’

I rattled off half a dozen verses and tried them

out on some eight-year-olds. It was a sobering,

painful experience. They told me my poems were

‘boring’. They were right. They were preachy and had

no emotional impact. I’d settled for the ‘It’s worthy...

that’ll do’ school of writing.

I phoned the poet Matt Simpson and we talked

for a good hour or more. He reminded me that all

really good poems ‘should recreate an emotion or

an experience for the reader’. He suggested I forget

trying to write for children and just write what came

to me instead. ‘And avoid contemporary references,’

he said. ‘They date your work.’ Sound advice.

I was back in school the following day and while

on break duty had to separate two 14-year-olds

who were half-killing each other behind the bike

sheds. One kept saying: ‘I didn’t mean to hit him Sir, I

was just messing.’

I was just...

That phrase stayed in my head and when I got

home, I sat down and wrote:

I was just

Teaching our cat to swim

And suddenly

The bathroom was flooded

Four more verses wrote themselves. It was about

as far away from a worthy poem as you could get

and, to my amazement, was accepted. Teachers

have since told me that its very grimness has given

them starting points for discussions on cruelty and

how it often grows out of ignorance and emotional

carelessness rather than an intrinsically evil nature.

‘Avoid contemporary references …’

With that advice in mind, I stopped talking at

children and began talking to them. I discovered that

the trappings of our respective childhoods were

Rhyme and reasonKevin McCann on the benefits

– for writer and students – of taking poetry into schools

1Kevin McCann:

I stopped talking at

children and began

talking to them


different – when I was a kid TV was black and white,

computers existed only in sci-fi films etc – but there

were constants. We’d all been worried about the

fluff monster that lurked under the bed. The death of

a family pet was devastating. Being the new kid was

no fun at all. We didn’t like bullies.

My poems began to change. I wrote about

ghosts, a pet dog that ‘bites the heads off rats’ but

at night pillows your head and guards you ‘from

the Gloom’. I wrote about how lousy it felt to be

bullied because you were overweight and how

you were overweight because you were bullied. It

was liberating to find that I could write poems for

children that I could be proud of as poems.

And like Fin Kennedy (UK Writer, Autumn 2009)

I discovered that my schools work became ‘a kind

sort of informal research’. All power to you Fin!

I found that writing poetry isn’t just fun; it can

be so much more than that. Over and over I’ve seen

under-achievers begin to shine as they discover

that problems with spelling etc are no bar to the

imagination. In fact, I’d go further.

The notion that there’s no wrong answer in

poetry had a real and positive impact on children

who usually gave up before they’d even started

because they were convinced that they were

bound to fail and, therefore, there was no point in

even trying.

In one school where I worked for three consecu-

tive terms running an after-school poetry club, a boy

with learning difficulties improved his reading age

by four years in two terms. And that wasn’t down

to me. I was merely a vehicle. It was the profound

effect of poetry itself.

Given a writing exercise, an adult will often ask:

‘What’s the point of this exercise?’ Children will write

for the best reason there is: the joy of it. Adults want

their work to ‘say something’. Children will just write.

If their piece has an implied subtext, all the better,

but they rarely set out to make a point. They just

write what comes.

I remember one girl writing a poem about

Mars. She described the surface as looking like ‘a

crumpled duvet.’ Her last two lines read:

On Mars everything’s red.

Even the silence.

I’d sell my soul for an image like that!

When I asked her how she’d thought of it, she

adopted a long-suffering air – she was eight – and

said: ‘I didn’t think of it. It just came to me.’ Then she

paused and added: ‘It was inspiration.’

In 1991, I finally left teaching altogether to write

full time. I thought I’d continue with schools for a

few more years at most. I imagined that it would

only be matter of time before I was headlining

literary festivals and appearing on telly. The airs and

graces we give ourselves ! Eighteen years on, I still

visit schools and still love it.

I’ve had some bad experiences, but they’ve

always been with ‘project facilitators’ who’ve seen

schools work as either a nice little earner or a spring-

board into some publicly-funded sinecure. I’ve met a

few – a very few – bad teachers. The majority have

been hardworking, dedicated men and women

doing an excellent job despite outside interference.

I’ve worked for a whole host of agencies. I

adopted the simple rule of shopping around until

I found one that suited. These days I’m with Top of

the Tree (www.topofthetree.info) and it suits me

very well indeed.

If you read the article by Philippa Johnston, the

director of literaturetraining (UK Writer, Autumn

2009), and want to try schools work for yourself, I

have a few extra pieces of advice:

■ Schools pay for your services – give them their

money’s worth.

■ Don’t expect respect – earn it.

■ Have a look at Ted Hughes’s excellent Poetry In

The Making.

■ Don’t undersell yourself in your flyer but don’t

exaggerate either. You’re not an estate agent!

■ Shop around – these days few agencies expect

you to be under exclusive contract.

■ Ditto your Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check

– see if there’s a Play Action Council in your area.

Merseyside’s did mine and it was considerably

cheaper than everywhere else I’d approached.

■ Ditto public liabilty insurance. I phoned the Arts

Council and they recommended Blake Insurance

Services (www.higos.co.uk) – £84 for a jargon-free

Creative Arts Policy.

And what about my own writing? I still write

and publish poems, both for adults and children.

One feeds the other. I’ve started storytelling (long

saga – some other time), just finished my first novel

and have several schools visits lined up – to prepare

I’ll be reading pirate stories, Welsh folktales and

researching ecology.

Of course, I could have stayed in teaching, been

financially secure and now be looking forward to

retiring. But I’m a poet which means, like Oisin in the

Irish legend, I have no sense at all.

AN

DY FO

RD

Given a

writing

exercise, an

adult will

often ask,

‘What’s the

point of this

exercise?’

Children will

write for the

best reason

there is: the

joy of it.


YOU SHOW ME YOURS...

ONLINE PEER REVIEW

Online peer review sites for writers have prolifer-

ated over the past few years. They offer infor-

mation, community and the all-important feedback

from someone who isn’t your mum. Anonymity

is one of the most appealing aspects of the peer

review site, particularly for aspiring writers who

labour in secret and would struggle to

show their work to those around them.

Of course, anonymity doesn’t shield

you from the pain when a harsh review

drops into your inbox. Writing and

publishing are wholly subjective indus-

tries; rejection and criticism are part and

parcel of surviving within them.

The major peer review sites differ

dramatically in both their aims and the

ways they are set up. All will take up

more than an hour of your time each

week, so it is worth choosing very

carefully. Do bear in mind that you will

have to put in as much, if not more, as

you will get out of a peer review site.

One of the most professional and useful sites is

Writewords: a good, solid site with a wealth of

information for anyone involved in writing for the UK

market. It has news, jobs, forums and lots of other

stuff. Published authors use it, which is a good sign,

and the quality of the commentary on their forums

indicates a higher than average level of intelligence,

talent and experience. It costs £35 per year, which is

within the reach of every aspiring writer. Time spent

here is unlikely to be a bad investment.

Now we come to Authonomy. Not a bad idea.

HarperCollins produces a rather splendid site (I love

the antiquated printing block header) and lets all

aspiring authors upload their work. It also added a

vast and now rather unwieldy forum where writers

can spend hours of their lives trying to garner

enough ‘bookshelf’ placements to put themselves

up the ranks and get on to the ‘editor’s desk’, or

spotted by an agent.

A quick look in the ‘Good News’ area of the

forum (disingenuously subtitled, ‘Got lucky?’ rather

than, ‘Got busy and worked your tail off with

querying?’) reveals that the women who scored

an agent did so by sending out 125 queries, which

rather takes the luck aspect out of it.

HarperCollins has picked up a few novels from

Authonomy, but the professional critiques it offers

monthly are flagging and some have never been

received at all.

Of course, every so often an

enterprising agent will trawl through

it, before becoming bored by the

general quality of the unspeakable

garbage clogging Authonomy’s rapidly

hardening arteries. This will take less

than five minutes, and the probability

that they will find you is so slim it’s just

not worth it. I could go on, but I won’t.

You can also self-publish through

Authonomy, which has teamed up

with Create Space to offer this ‘service’.

This has long been expected by those

watching the site. They are a huge pool

of sitting ducks, ripe for a nudge towards putting

their books into print themselves and enabling HC

to turn a resource-sucking site into an earner. Always

useful.

YouWriteOn (YWO) started out well. You upload

your work and earn credits by reading and critiquing

that of others. I can see two problems with this:

first, you can’t choose what you critique, which is

fine, but if you hate fantasy/romantic fiction/literary

fiction and it lands in your inbox, you’re not going to

review it from the standpoint of a reader of fantasy/

romantic fiction/literary fiction, which is what the

writer will be, and where they are aiming their

manuscript.

The forums do not look like a very nice place to

spend any time: thousands of posts by the same

Six peer review sites:writewords.org.uk

Feature articles and

online community –

costs £35 per year

authonomy.com

HarperCollins’s

community site for

writers, readers and

publishers

youwriteon.com

Peer review and

publisher tie-ins

‘Miss Pitch’, who runs pitchparlour.blogspot.com, looks at peer review websites for novelists and short story writers

Peer to peer

1Learning to write well is something only you can teach yourself. Feedback gives valuable pointers, but becoming an author is about long, lonely hours spent cracking your knuckles and your pencils, and writing things down

Every so often an enterprising

agent will trawl through

it, before becoming bored by

the general quality of the unspeakable

garbage


YOU SHOW ME YOURS...

self-promoting members is never a good sign. On

the upside, the site has had some successes: The

Bufflehead Sisters and The Third Pig Detective Agency

both came to mainstream publishing through YWO.

Another book, Caligula, appears to have been written

by a man who already had lots of media contacts and

got his agent though a friend of a friend, which isn’t

the lottery ticket almost every other writer on the site

is looking for, so I think it’s misleading.

Litopia appears to be splendid, apart from the fact

that you have to prove yourself to get into it and

contribute to the forums to earn Brownie points and

so on. In theory that’s good as it prevents lurkers

and gets things moving, but it has no transparency

and the unsettling ‘judged and found wanting’

feeling of a playground clique. I haven’t got time for

that, so I confess to having no knowledge of its inner

workings, but it isn’t for the likes of me anyway.

No one at Litopia (as far as I can see, and feel

free to correct me) is going to pay you for your

writing. You might make a few friends,

which is always nice between cups of

tea and Word and games of solitaire,

but don’t forget that you need a

cheque to pay for the gas to boil the

kettle.

Litopia is the brainchild of agent

and former author Peter Cox, whose

client list is bizarrely eclectic, but he

does seem to engage with the site and

new writers. The Litopia Daily and After

Dark podcasts are always worth a listen,

so it’s probably a cut above the others.

The Bookshed also works on an appli-

cation basis. Writers applying should be aware that

it is an offshoot of YWO (though, I believe, wholly

unaffiliated), formed by a small group of writers,

presumably because they were sick of sub-standard

writing and critiquing. I think it has worked better

in theory than in practice. Once again, if you want

to spend time seeking the approval of people you

don’t know, and talking to other writers (some of

them published) about writing, go for it.

This is a only a small selection of the sites available

to aspiring authors based in the UK, but they are

perhaps the most prominent. My main criticism

of them (apart from Writewords, which is rigidly

organised) is that they have no clear aim apart from

bringing writers together.

Writers who want to talk to other writers about

the ‘craft’ of writing can do so (and probably do)

at writing groups or on an MA course. The fact that

they understand how writing works does not auto-

matically make them better writers. Some people are

good storytellers and that’s all there is to it, although

I hasten to add that good storytellers must get their

spelling and grammar ducks in a row before submit-

ting to agents and publishers. The general tone of

the most active participants in these sites is that of

approval seeking. Am I good enough? You will not

become good enough by spending vast tranches of

time on peer review sites, that I can assure you.

I set up the Pitch Parlour because I wanted to

give people the chance to get their query package,

or ‘pitch’ reviewed. A bad query turns an agent’s

default setting to ‘no’, which as an unknown author is

something you want to avoid.

I have kept the pitches and articles short, and

post only three times a week, so anyone wanting

to keep up with the site can do so easily. Minimal

attention is paid to critiquing the writing or the

subject of the writing; the main criteria

is the impact the work will have on a

reader: the agent.

The Parlour is in its infancy, but the

response from industry professionals

has been favourable and I think this is

because of its clear aims (in tutoring

aspiring writers to see the difference

between their writing as a creative

process and their potential career as

a business). Apart from my anonymity,

the site is transparent in its aims: it’s

free, it’s friendly and, so far, it’s proving

useful to the writers who submit their

work. It focuses on one small part of

writing life, but perhaps one of the most important:

getting an agent or publisher to notice your work.

Many of the people on the peer review sites

I have looked at are procrastinating. They haven’t

grasped the central and key part of being a writer:

that it is a solitary occupation requiring enormous

discipline.

Learning to write well is something only you can

teach yourself. Feedback gives valuable pointers, but

becoming an author is about long, lonely hours spent

cracking your knuckles and your pencils, and writing

things down. Then rewriting them. Then doing it all

again. Then it’s about finding a market for your work

and learning how to present it to that market.

It isn’t about getting bored and opening up a

peer review site with lots of other people who can’t

commit and talking about how unfair life is.

bookshed.eu

‘Created by writers

for writers’ – includes

open discussion forum

litopia.com

‘A writers’ meeting

place’ pitchparlour. blogspot.com

Blog featuring

interviews with writers

and discussion of book

pitches and query

letters

Many on the sites have not grasped the key part of

being a writer: it is a solitary occupation

requiring enormous discipline


TWITTER

I n order to understand Twitter from a writer’s

perspective, I think you first have to see how

it differs from that other social networking site du

jour, Facebook. Once you get beyond the vampire

games and the quizzes (hey, I’m a freelance writer

– ridiculous displacement activities go with the

territory), Facebook is essentially a way of staying

up to date with family and friends. It allows you to

swap photos and gossip and generally feel that you

know what your mates are up to, even if you can’t

be bothered actually communicating with them (am

I wrong to think it’s particularly helpful for us blokes

in that regard?).

Twitter is different. You have

to agree to let someone be your

Facebook ‘friend’; on Twitter,

you can ‘follow’ anyone. One

click, and you instantly know

what Stephen Fry (@stephenfry)

and Jonathan Ross (@Wossy) are

doing, almost every hour of almost

every day. It’s legitimised celebrity

stalking, more accurate (and inter-

esting) than the gutter press, and you

don’t have to take a bath afterwards to feel

clean.

Fine, you say. Who wouldn’t want

to imagine they’re living the life of Fry, or

bask a little in its reflected glory? So, it’s

another displacement activity – a stream-of-

consciousness glance into the lives and minds of

random people, most of whom you will never meet.

Perhaps critics have a point: if Twitter were to vanish

tomorrow I’m sure it wouldn’t directly affect my

ability to write (or form a relationship).

However, I would miss the palpable sense of

community and camaraderie, and would doubtless

be a good deal grumpier as I went about my

business. I tend to follow writers and producers

(and seem to have a handful following me), and it

lulls me into thinking that I am not alone. If I want to

whinge about poverty, deadlines, commissions, or

lack of commissions, I can – all in 140 characters. It’s

like a haiku of unfiltered honesty. It might not make

sense to everyone who reads it, but for those who

work in TV or publishing or the media generally,

there may be an understanding, even a nod of

sympathy.

So, it’s a community, of sorts – a pun-obsessed,

self-absorbed community of navel-gazers, perhaps,

but a community all the same. And we all need a

community, especially if we’re starving in our garrets

and the only communities we can see from our seats

are the fascinating moulds evolving in our coffee mugs.

Twitter has its practical side, too. Occasionally

a status update will become a plea for help (tech-

nology queries are common); even more rarely, a

complete stranger will send a message (also limited

to 140 characters) that might contain the answer

we’re searching for – even if it’s only switch it off

and start again.

There are, I’m sure,

many more interesting

and vital uses of Twitter

than this self-help group for

hacks that I’ve described. I

loved what happened on

Twitter during the contested

elections in Iran – very real

and practical progress was being

made and help was being offered even

as we tweeted – and I haven’t even

addressed Twitter’s ability to act as

something of a mini-RSS/news feed – the

Media Guardian (@mediaguardian), BAFTA

(@Baftaonline) and, of course, the Guild (@

TheWritersGuild) are all worth following. And,

as I live in Somerset, a plug here for South West

Screen (@southwestscreen).

But where else can one find insights and ponder-

ings from Douglas Coupland (@DougCoupland)

rubbing shoulders with the latest from Mike Skinner

of The Streets (@skinnermike), and nuggets of

wisdom from the QI elves (@qikipedia),?

Get yourself a Twitter account, follow the elves

and I can guarantee you will learn at least one inter-

esting thing, every day, and possibly even before

breakfast. What other displacement activity can you,

hand on heart, say that about?

Tweet tweet!Martin Day (@sirdigbychicken) explains what writers can gain from using the free microblogging service Twitter

UK Writer Autumn 2008 35

‘Join the Writers’ Guild for pensions, legal advice, support, events, contacts – because, as a professional writer, it’s YOUR union’

Lisa Evans (playwright and screenwriter)

Documents

UK Writer Winter 2009