12 May 2013
Posted in TV

An obituary by Nick Yapp

The actress and writer Anne Valery, who has recently died, was a long-time member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and a key player in the Guild’s unending fight to protect writers from censorship in all its forms.

Her acting career began in 1949 with modest parts in several British films, including that of Clothilde (the girl in the punt) in the Ealing Comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. Over the next ten years she appeared in nine films and two BBC TV Series (BBC’s Sunday-Night Theatre and The Vise). As a writer, her credits included Emmerdale, Crossroads, Angels, Crown Court and, most significantly, Tenko, for which she and fellow Guild member Jill Hyem wrote the bulk of the 30 episodes.

Every decade involves the Guild in at least one battle against censorship, and a Censorship Appeals Committee became part of the Guild’s armoury from its inception in 1962. There were regular protestations from both the BBC and ITA that they were not in favour of censorship. ‘In the normal sense of the word,’ wrote Huw Wheldon (Controller, Programmes, BBC Television in the late 1960s), ‘there is no censorship in BBC Television.’ But Mary Whitehouse had her followers and her friends within the industry, and an attitude of ‘we know best’ was adopted by many producers and commissioning editors. The Guild Censorship Committee was kept busy.

Valery was Chair of the Guild Censorship Committee in the 1990s, at a time when battle was joined on the issue of quotas in the film and television industries. In an article for Writers’ Newsletter, then the Guild’s journal, Valery argued that contemporary writers for British films and television were facing a threat similar to that created by the Cinematograph Films Bill in 1937 – the Bill that led to the creation of the Screen Writers’ Association, the direct ancestor of the Guild. Failure of the British government to withstand US pressure after WW2 had resulted in an almost complete annihilation of the British film industry. Valery believed the threat had returned, some 50 years later. ‘Already,’ she wrote, ‘the US has swamped our television drama slots with programmes undercutting all others. They dominate satellite television; control BskyB and five national newspapers, provide over 90% of videos; and are taking over our publishing houses… Even radio is not immune…’ In Valery’s opinion, the only way to counter this threat was to follow the European example – the EU had recently directed member states to ensure that at least 51% of programmes transmitted by their television stations was of European origin.

Thatcher did not accept Valery’s view, and that particular battle was lost. But all of us, as members of the Guild today, are grateful to Valery for the role that she played and the work she did on the Guild’s behalf in that particular battle and on a day-by-day basis. There is no Guild Censorship Committee at the moment. It lapses from time to time, but is regularly reformed as and when it is needed. The fight goes on.

Nick Yapp is the author of the Writers' Guild official history, The Write Stuff

23 February 2013
Posted in TV

The Campaign for Regional Broadcasting Midlands launches in Birmingham

The BBC's Midland region raises a quarter of the BBC's £3.6 billion licence fee take, but only spends 2% of its income in the region. Expenditure per licence fee payer is £804 in London, £82 in the north of England, and just £12.30 in the Midlands.

These statistics were presented to 80 actors, writers, producers and other television makers crammed into a Birmingham pub to launch a campaign to insist that the BBC gives more back to the Midlands region.

Speakers at the meeting included Equity's Tracey Briggs and Writers' Guild President David Edgar. Along with BECTU, the Guild is officially supporting the campaign. The last Guild Executive Council meeting passed a motion supporting the Campaign for Regional Broadcasting's demand that more BBC production be brought back to Birmingham.

As Tracey Briggs and David Edgar pointed out, BBC Birmingham has a proud history in both television and radio drama, and not just in the 'golden age' of the 1970s, when David Rose was producing groundbreaking plays and films by David Rudkin, David Hare, Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell. The Birmingham studios at Pebble Mill once produced 10% of BBC output.

Since the announcement of the move to Salford, BBC Birmingham has lost its pioneering factual unit to Bristol, the Silver St soap, and its last one-off drama producer. Its state of the art radio studio sits empty except for the few days a month of Archers recording. Its only television drama goes out on daytime TV.

Using BBC statistics, campaign chair Mike Bradley has calculated the huge disparity between what the BBC raises from the Midland region and what it spends. Nearly a third of what the BBC spends in London comes from the region. The aim of the campaign is to demand a fairer deal for the Midlands' television makers.

The campaign website has an online petition at www.crbmidlands.org.uk

21 February 2013
Posted in TV

An interview with TV storyliner and scriptwriter Kristy Jones

How did you get started in writing and storylining?

The first piece of work I wrote was a play for infant school children for a theatre in education company in south Wales. I only wrote it so I could direct the play; at the time I hadn't even thought of writing as a career and was concentrating on becoming a theatre director. It was a great experience, a four-year-old child won't sit down and pay attention to something that doesn't interest them. I got to see first-hand what worked and what didn't – there were a few rewrites during the first few days of the tour! My first storylining work was on Belonging for BBC Wales. I had worked with Sophie Fante, who's currently script producer on Casualty, on the first series of Torchwood. Sophie is a brilliant producer and mentor and now a good friend. On Torchwood Sophie was the assistant producer and I was a lowly trainee. She was brilliant at giving me opportunities and taking the time to explain how things worked, and coming from a theatre background to something like as huge as Torchwood, I definitely needed it. After Torchwood ended Sophie went on to work as executive producer on the final series of Belonging an she asked me to come along to storylining. I couldn't believe that you could sit in a room telling stories, having a laugh and getting paid for it.

What are the key elements of work as a storyliner?

A lot of it is creative, the actual creation of the stories and characters, but it's also quite technical and involves logistics. You have to ensure that there's enough content in each episode, that every episode has a dramatic peak. You have to use the appropriate number of interior and exterior scenes, make sure that your character count is accurate.

Having said that, every show is different. Soaps like Eastenders, Hollyoaks and Pobol y Cwm are very slick. They are massive shows with lots of different people working on them so the production system has to work. Hollyoaks and Eastenders had similar systems in my time. The writers would come in to a story conference every couple of weeks. Everybody would sit round a table and throw ideas around about what stories should be told over the next block of episodes. After story conference the story team would take all the ideas away and try to work out the structure of that story. We needed to decide things like how many episodes it would take to tell the story, how it would fit in with other long running stories, and if all the actors available to tell that particular story.

13 February 2013
Posted in TV

WPC56 is a new five-part television drama about a female police officer in the 1950’s, to be launched this March on BBC1. Series Creator Dominique Moloney explains how it all began.

Back in 2010 the producers at BBC Birmingham were looking to commission a returnable daytime crime series in the vein of Dixon of Dock Green. As fate would have it I had written a proposal about a young WPC in the 1950s, and Executive Producer Will Trotter liked it enough to take it through the various stages of development.

At the time I had over 20 episodes of BBC TV's Doctors under my belt, and had been lucky enough to work on all three series of another BBC series, Land Girls (created by Roland Moore). So the team at BBC Birmingham were familiar enough with my work to trust me with creating the characters and to begin story-lining an original series.

I have always been fascinated by 1950s culture, especially what it meant to be a woman in that decade. After a brief taste of freedom in the fields and munitions factories of World War 2, an entire generation of women were forced back into the domestic sphere. There were of course those who chose to pursue a career, but it was rare for them to venture beyond the limited gender roles assigned to them. This is why I wanted to tell the story of Gina Dawson, a young woman entering a traditionally male dominated world, having to fight daily to prove her worth as a police constable.

15 January 2013
Posted in TV

Rachel Murrell on the opportunities for children's animation writers overseas

Photo: What's The Big Idea? by Planet Nemo Animation

It happened again this morning. The postman delivered a DVD of a new pre-school animation I’ve written. I ripped open the envelope, put the disc in the DVD player, hit ‘play’ – and couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying.

It’s not the result of early-onset senility – not yet, anyway – but of a sustained campaign of pitching producers outside the UK. And while I’ve been able to get work from France, Spain, Belgium, Norway and Germany, sadly, I don’t have the language skills to match.

It all started in 2006 when I was un-agented and short of work, and I emailed dozens of companies in the UK and abroad offering my services as a scriptwriter. Most ignored me, but one or two of the Europeans wrote back politely asking for a CV. Producer Frederic Puech of Planet Nemo Animation in Paris was one, and he suggested we meet when he was next in London.

We met for tea in the British Library – I like to set the right tone! – and soon afterwards, he hired me to write 10 episodes of his new show Silly Bitty Bunny. My schoolgirl French, while embarrassing, turned out to be no barrier to me working with Fred, or his then script editor Diane Morel. Both speak excellent English, and got every joke.

As time went on, I found more doors open to me than I’d expected. Of course I wasn’t the first to knock on them: several of my fellow British animation writers work for producers in France, Germany and elsewhere in Northern Europe. The reason is simple. Many European territories have subsidies available that see a lot of shows go into development. But that’s not enough to make them work internationally. Animation is a global business. Shows have to sell. And many European producers are open to hiring British writers because we’re seen as good at the character, tone and humour that will make a show a global success.

11 January 2013
Posted in TV

Rachel Flowerday on her experience co-creating a new BBC drama series, Father Brown, based on the short stories by GK Chesterton

Photo (BBC): Mark Williams as Father Brown 

On Tuesday morning I found myself standing in the Sainsbury’s magazine aisle. Mouth dry. Palms slightly sweaty. Because the following week’s TV listings magazines had just arrived, replete with reviews, interviews, articles… How had I ended up here, with the TX date of my first original series (co-developed with Tahsin Guner, another BBC Writers’ Academy alumnus) less than a week away?

It was all down to Ann Widdecombe. Thanks, Ann.

Back in 2011, Tahsin and I (at this stage, barely acquaintances, much less creative collaborators) were at the end of the road with a pair of original detective dramas we’d independently pitched to BBC Daytime through John Yorke and Will Trotter. Much as the Beeb liked what we’d invented, in order to risk their limited cash, they wanted something a little more bankable.

Roll up, Ms. Widdecombe. She had just put out a Radio 4 show discussing her favourite novelist – GK Chesterton – and his Father Brown short stories, about an unassuming Catholic priest who moonlights as an amateur detective. John pitched the stories straight-off to Liam Keelan (then BBC Head of Daytime), and within days, Tahsin and I were asked – independently – to create treatments, building a precinct and supporting characters around the central priest. Parish secretary Mrs. McCarthy first drew breath in an email to Ceri Meyrick, our producer, in which I pitched a 'doughty, no-nonsense 60-something lay second-in-command who’s kind of a mother-figure but who probably also slightly fancies him/dotes on him… someone to check facts for him, to protect him from the wrath of the diocese, to make sure he eats…' Some of that original email is now on the BBC Father Brown website in her character biog. That’ll learn me.

07 January 2013
Posted in TV

Rachel Murrell on writing for an animated series about the everyday issues facing 9-to-14-year-olds 

As a pre-school scriptwriter, I don’t often get the chance to write about periods, snogging and priapic teenage boys. So when Ken Anderson and Sueann Smith of Red Kite Animation offered me the chance to help set up an animated series for tweens about ‘a group of friends on the rocky road to puberty’, I jumped at the chance.

The show in question – then called Girls’ Things – had been devised by director Mercedes Marro of Tomavistas in Barcelona. Ken saw its potential as light-hearted way to raise important issues for tweens about everyday moral dilemmas, difficulties in relationships, trouble with body image, etc. Confident that this would work for the BBC, he agreed to co-produce the show with Tomavistas, Dutch company Submarine, and Catalan broadcaster TVC.

I took one look at the show’s bible, and I was sold. The zingy design felt very original, and the fact that the scripts had to get across accurate information through character and comedy was the kind of challenge I love. And I wasn’t worried about lack of material. My own misspent youth was stuffed with enough accident and embarrassment to drive a fair few stories, and for the rest, I asked around. ‘What does an erection feel like?’ was a great conversation starter at parties.

No. What scared me was the breadth of the target demographic: 9-14 year olds. Kids in this age range have vastly different emotional and social understanding – not to mention different physiological experience. And that’s before you factor in the cultural differences between the three territories involved. Surely it would be impossible to write for all of them?

13 December 2012
Posted in TV

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer were given the Writers' Guild prize at the British Comedy Awards in London last night. The writing and performing duo have created a number of memorable TV shows, including Vic Reeves Big Night Out, The Smell Of Reeves and Mortimer, Catterick, and Shooting Stars.

Other winners at the Comedy Awards were:

• Male TV comic - Lee Mack
• Female TV comic - Jo Brand
• TV comedy actor - Peter Capaldi
• TV comedy actress - Rebecca Front
• Comedy Entertainment Personality - Charlie Brooker
• Comedy Entertainment Programme - Harry Hill's TV BurpS
• itcom - Hunderby
• New comedy programme - Hunderby
• Comedy Breakthrough Artist - Morgana Robinson

30 November 2012
Posted in TV

The Guild has backed S4C’s refusal to scrap a repeat episode of soap opera Pobol y Cym following a complaint by the Welsh Government.

According to the BBC News Wales website, ministers complained after a character on the BBC-produced TV series said the Welsh government "doesn't have the backbone" to cull badgers.A planned cull in west Wales was cancelled in March when ministers decided to vaccinate badgers instead.

The Welsh government claims that S4C and BBC Wales, which makes the programme that has run for 38 years, have breached editorial guidelines and that the government has been denied a right of reply.

S4C, however, said the programme included a variety of viewpoints and repeated Wednesday's episode on Thursday as planned.

Guild General secretary Bernie Corbett congratulated S4C on 'standing up to the most bovine attempt at censorship in broadcasting history'.

One Guild member commented on Facebook: 'When soaps do try and be contemporary, and let their characters talk in a credible way about issues affecting their lives, they get this sort of [rubbish] from politicians. This objection is totally unreasonable – not a breach of guidelines – but it still causes trouble for the programme-makers and broadcasters.'

02 November 2012
Posted in TV

Writers' Guild Award to feature in ceremony on 12 December

The British Comedy Awards are back next month for the 22nd year and will include the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Writer(s) Of The Year. Our past winners have included Armando Iannucci, Sam Bain and Jess Armstrong, and Graham Linehan. The Guild members on the jury are Gail Renard, pictured above with Jury Chair, renowned producer and agent, Peter Bennett Jones (left) and writer David Quantick.

The programme goes out on Channel 4 on 12 December and, because it’s live, tends towards the controversial and edgy. Anything can happen and, as history has shown, it usually does.

08 October 2012
Posted in TV

Ming Ho reports from the Time to Change ‘Meet the Media’ Event

Mental health: does TV perpetuate negative stereotypes? That was the question posed by Time to Change, an anti-stigma programme run by the charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, at an event for television drama professionals held on 1 October at the Hospital Club in London.

The evening began with a new training film presented by broadcaster Alistair Stewart, which aims to promote good practice in the portrayal of mental illness, and includes interviews with writers and directors involved in high-profile stories such as the bipolar disorder of Jean and Stacey Slater in EastEnders and the breakdown of Dr Ruth Winters in Casualty.

Kate Rowland, BBC Creative Director of New Writing, then chaired a panel discussion with writers Danny Brocklehurst (Exile; Accused), Dana Fainaru (Casualty), and Bill Lyons (Emmerdale), and mental health nurse, Lol Butterfield, who had advised on Emmerdale’s Zak Dingle storyline.

Research into a three-month sample of TV drama, led by the Glasgow Media Group, revealed that 74 programmes contained storylines on mental health issues – and these featured 33 instances of violence toward others and 53 examples of self-harm. While almost half were deemed to be sympathetic portrayals, the characters tended to be shown as tragic victims; and 63% of references to mental health were thought to be ‘pejorative, flippant, or unsympathetic’. How can we, as writers, redress this disproportionate image of a link between mental illness and violence and dispel the fear that it engenders?

30 August 2012
Posted in TV

Campaign to sign up archive writers begins this autumn

The Guild’s ground-breaking new agreements with BBC TV came fully into force on Tuesday this week, 28 August 2012. All new commissions are now under these new terms, and all scripts commissioned under the previous agreement since November 2002 automatically switch over to the new terms.

Later this autumn there will be a massive mail-out to almost 11,000 writers and estates commissioned since the origins of the BBC up to 2002 in which the Guild, agents and the BBC will advise switching to the new terms in most cases (some writers of highly successful shows may be better advised to remain on the old terms – if in doubt consult your agent and/or the Guild).

There are three new agreements, which have been posted in the Rates & Agreements section of the Guild website:

Television Script Agreement: This is the successor to many previous agreements between the Guild and the BBC over the decades and sets out the minimum terms for most mainstream drama and sitcom contracts – not only minimum fees, but also advances, repeat fees, credits, pension rights and much more.

General Script Agreement: A new agreement closely modelled on the TSA which extends Guild terms to broadcast scripts under 15 minutes, material commissioned primarily for online use, drama within documentaries, some animation, and other areas.

Sketch Agreement: This is a completely re-drafted agreement, replacing an obsolete contract after many years trying to bring rewards for sketch writing in line with the modern TV and entertainment industry.

The new system will bring writers extra payments when their work proves popular on the BBC iPlayer, thanks to a new service – Writers Digital Payments (WDP) – set up jointly by the Guild and the agents’ trade body, the Personal Managers’ Association. When TV programmes are accessed online, the writer will be paid in proportion to the number of viewers who decide to watch them. This form of TV watching is expected to grow massively now that the latest Smart TVs and YouView boxes will enable millions of viewers to access online programmes directly on their living-room TV sets.

The key points of the new agreements are: 

• The 15% surcharge on upfront fees that all TV writers have received since 2002 will disappear – to be redistributed both by WDP and by far higher repeat payments for the 'secondary' channels such as BBC3, BBC4, CBBC and Cbeebies.
• The Guild’s collective agreements with the BBC are expanded to cover – for the first time – programmes shorter than 15 minutes, drama segments within documentaries, adult-oriented animations, shows written solely for online use, exploitation of programme formats and characters in a wide range of live performances, merchandising, etc.
• Repeat fees on the 'network' channels BBC1 and BBC2 are cut to a 50% residual in peaktime and 20% offpeak, in a move designed to bring homegrown archive material into the increased number of repeat slots, especially on daytime TV. It is expected that the same amount of money will be spread among a much larger range of TV writers past and present.
• There will be further negotiations to safeguard payments to children’s TV writers when kids’ programmes disappear from BBC1 and BBC2 early next year.
• Special arrangements have been put in place to ensure that existing writers on EastEnders, Casualty, Holby and Doctors do not lose out.