11 January 2012
Posted in Radio

Entries are invited for prestigious radio drama awards run by the Writers' Guild and the Society of Authors

Submission deadline: Monday 10th February 2012

The Tinniswood Award for best original radio drama 

The Tiniswood Award honours the best original radio drama script broadcast in the UK over 2011 and until 30 June 2012, with a first prize of £1,500. The work must be an original piece for radio, and may also include the first episode from an original series or serial. When submitting 15-minute episodes from a series or serial we will require consecutive episodes (including the first episode) to make up at least 45 minutes. The judges reserve the right to call in the subsequent episodes if required. We welcome 30-minute plays provided they were stand-alone and that characters and situations are original to the writer. An adaptation for radio of a piece originally written for any other medium will not be eligible.

Submissions will be accepted from producers only and are restricted to a maximum of two entries per producer. Submissions must consist of:

• a complete nomination form from the producer;four copies of the writer’s script (as broadcast)
• a non-refundable entry fee of £50 - cheques should be made out to ‘The Writers’ Guild’ or by BACs to Unity Trust Bank, Account Name: Writers' Guild of Great Britain Tinniswood Award, Account No. 2013995, Sort Code: 08-60-01. Raising an invoice can be arranged
• a supporting statement, 250 word synopsis 250 words author biography (which should be emailed to anne@writersguild.org.uk)

Entries will not be returned and should be sent to Anne Hogben, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, 40 Rosebery Avenue, London, EC1R 4RX.

Judges for the 2012 award are yet to be confirmed. We are grateful to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society Ltd (ALCS) for their generous sponsorship of the Tinniswood Award.

The Imison Award for best original radio drama by a writer new to radio 

The Imison Award encourages new talent by rewarding the best original radio drama script by a writer new to radio, with a first prize of £1,500. The work must have been broadcast in the UK over 2011 or scheduled for transmission until 30 June 2012. It must be the first dramatic work by the writer(s) that has been broadcast. It may also include the first episode from an original series or serial. An adaptation for radio of a piece originally written for another medium will not be eligible.

Submissions will be accepted from any party and must consist of

• a completed nomination form
• three copies of the writer's original script and recording of the broadcast (further copies may be requested if the work is short-listed)
• a supporting statement, 250 word synopsis and 250 word author biography (which should be emailed to jmccrum@societyofauthors.org)

Entries will not be returned and should be sent to Jo McCrum, The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London, SW10 9SB.The prize is judged by the Broadcasting Committee of the Society of Authors. We are grateful to the Peggy Ramsay Foundation for donating the prize money.

11 January 2012
Posted in Film

By Olivia Hetreed

It's strange what politicians do to themselves - you have an open goal and so you shoot yourself in the foot. 

The 'film community' as the media likes to have it, is all poised to welcome the Film Policy Review (FPR), in which Chris Smith and industry advisers have taken very careful soundings across the industry and come up with some bold but practical suggestions to help film-makers reach audiences, grow their businesses and sustain the industry rather than stumbling from one project to the next. But before that review can be launched next Monday, as already organised by the Department for Culture Media and Sport with Ed Vaizey and others due to speak, the Prime Minister makes a pre-emptive announcement and sets the commercial cat amongst the creative pigeons.

As far as one can tell from the early hints and whispers about the FPR there is no suggestion that funding will be withdrawn from arthouse projects or that Mike Leigh or any other film-maker is being sent off the pitch. Rather there is a push to allow independent producers to build businesses and attract investment by enabling them to hold on to some of the recoupment from their films, should they be successful.

And coupled with this, in response to the very strong case argued by the Writers' Guild, together with producers' organisation PACT and Directors UK, the bodies representing the key creative triumvirate of producer, writer and director, a recognition that creators need to be connected to the outcome of their work. At present it makes no difference if a film is successful or not: unless it is an absolute runaway hit the filmmakers have no way to access the revenues generated. So when they come to make their next film they must start all over again from scratch, raising money, selling all their interest in the project to get it financed - and once again being unable to build a company, fund the crucial development of ideas into scripts, or even sustain a career in which they are a proven success.

Amanda Nevill signalled the new role of the BFI very helpfully last spring at the British Screen Advisory Council conference when she said the BFI wanted to stand beside filmmakers not between them and government (the position taken by the UK Film Council). This is what the FPR seems to be following up on: arguing for sustainable funding policies and collaboration between distribution and production and among the filmmakers themselves.

While we have to wait till Monday for the full story let's not start despairing as some knee-jerk response, when we might just be looking at a good news story that somebody has accidentally spun the wrong way!

Olivia Hetreed is Chair of the Writers' Guild Film Committee

09 January 2012
Posted in General

An interview with Christina Kallas, President of the Federation of Screenwriters in Europe (FSE)

How did you come to be involved with the FSE?

I was a member of the presiding board of the German Writers’ Guild for many years and one of my fields of action was international collaboration. As a Greek living in Germany and making films all over the world, being engaged in talks with writers from other countries felt like home. When I was asked to also be the FSE delegate for my guild, I said yes. A month later I visited my first FSE General Assembly.

Why do you believe that the work of the FSE is so important for writers?

Because we live in an international world. And it is becoming more and more international. If we think that national legislation is going to protect our rights, then we should think again. Nowadays I even doubt whether lobbying for good European legislation is even enough, which is why I am so passionately engaged in establishing close and continuous collaboration on a global level.

How similar are the concerns of professional writers across Europe?

Very. There are countries which have less problems on one level but more on another. Our biggest common problem is the buy-out contract which seems to have established itself permanently in most of the countries, as well as acceptable minimum conditions for fees and credits. There are other issues: the way state aid is being distributed and accounted for, the transparency and monopoly of collecting societies, the ignorance of festivals, critics and academics in relation to our profession. And now we have the internet - a new ecosystem which is still in evolution and which may soon be the most important market for us writers.

Could you outline the main work of the FSE?

Among other things: we engage in common campaigns, information exchange and we formulate goals for Europe's writers and pursue them. We lobby at European Union level, we support national guilds where needed or when a problem arises, and we organise conferences to discuss our issues on an international level and decide on common actions.

09 January 2012
Posted in Theatre

Richard Bevan talks to the artistic director of Soho Theatre in London

Steve Marmion was appointed artistic director of Soho Theatre in the heart of London’s West End in 2010. The job involves discovering new talent and new work in an industry currently under siege from funding cuts.

Is there a difference between what you are doing at the Soho Theatre as a producing venue compared to other establishments?

I think so. I hope elements of my first season reflected that in the cycle of work that we find appealing here for our audiences. The crudest, simplest way of describing what kind of work we want to do is the best work that’s available to us. I know that people don’t set out to make bad plays but we do it quite a lot in the industry. I certainly want to pull away from any criteria about political agenda or nationality or anything like that and very simply look at plays next to each other and say which one is the best.

What kind of criteria comes into the equation when choosing plays?

Taste comes into play - mine and that of the team here, and also, importantly, that of our audience. We have an incredible comedy programme and audience here, brilliant new writing work and we’ve been exploring new opera, working with the likes of Sadler’s Wells on dance projects. I think where those things overlap and where you’re forced to make live work the most theatrical it can be is probably where we play to our strengths.

Why is convergence of comedy and drama so important to you at Soho?

Theatre is summed up with those two masks and has been for hundreds of years. As far as I’m aware one of those is the ‘comedy’ mask and the other side the ‘tragedy’ mask. So that to me means that those comedy plays that often get over looked or treated as a light version of the form, aren’t.

It’s also important because we have a comedy audience here and because our work on the different stages is so varied, where those things can overlap is probably where we are the most exciting. Comedy and innovation plays a major role in Soho’s remit but that does not mean traditional playwriting is becoming less important to the theatre.

Do you have a specific process to discover writers you’d like to work with?

We discover writers in the usual way - finding out what people have done before by them sending in scripts. But we don’t have an obvious system where you can say we do A, B and C. It also involves us seeing writers’ work when it’s being staged and that includes work around the fringe. Most of all we meet with writers who have written interesting scripts, have a chat, find out what their passions are and then look at the projects that we’re wanting to make and partnerships that we might want to be joining.

One thing that stands out about Soho Theatre is the eclectic range of productions it stages, not just straight dramas.

Yes, as an example there’s a writer whose work is in a very exciting cinematic style and they might be interested in exploring a piece that pushes the boundaries of digital performances. We’ve got a partnership with Watershed Productions, so that’s perfect for a hands-on collaboration with the aim of getting a piece produced.

What other avenues can writers go down to get noticed?

A massive tool for us is the new website which is an important portal for writers to keep checking because our brochure takes us five months into the future. So eyes on the website and you’ll see when a workshop drops in at the last minute. Get on our mailing list for writers and we’ll send you the details about things that are happening.

Could you explain about the Soho Six scheme?

We don’t have is a conventional scheme that engages lots of writers but can’t then produce what they create because I don’t understand why we would do that. What we have in a more formalised way is the Soho Six which is taking six writers on a six months attachment and creating an early idea that we can either take forward and develop for production, or if we don’t do that, we may have an interested partner who can take it on. I’m not doing a ‘here’s a perfectly, polished eighteenth draft of script, let’s give it a graveyard reading and then sit round a table and say it’s not quite right for us’.

04 January 2012
Posted in Books and Poetry

Stephen Leo Davis on self-publishing for Amazon Kindle

In 30-odd years of writing screenplays no-one has ever said to me: ‘This is a great moment to be trying to make a movie!’

But writers are up against it as never before. Television drama commissioning is in recession and the role of writers who do get commissioned is being brutally challenged by the ruthless industrialising of development and production that in turn lies behind a widely-perceived decline in quality and ambition of output.

The British movie industry – is like the Morgan Motor Company in relation to car manufacturing; utterly magnificent, but not war as we know it.

Meanwhile, the Grim Reaper has been working his way through mid-list fiction writers and non-celebrity authors for years. I can find cries of pain in newspapers right through the decade.

The decline of independent booksellers, the supermarket approach to book retailing, the destruction of the Net Book Agreement (Terry Maher, then boss of Dillons, was very cheery about his achievement when I met him recently at a social event in the sunny Cotswold uplands) have all combined to erode publishers’ confidence in the sort of risk-taking that would seem to all reasonable people to be the precursor to invention and creativity in literature, as in drama.

But grinning at us from a corner are the blood-drenched jaws of the selfsame animal that, we hear, has virtually finished off the music recording business: the internet.

30 December 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

 Jan Woolf of the Guild’s Books Committee reflects on the Guild’s events in partnership with Black’s in London, and looks forward to the 2012 programme

You come in, sit down and have a coffee – a good coffee mind ; unless you prefer tea. If we’re beyond October the fires are lit. Then we settle in the same comfort enjoyed by children listening to a story. We hear from the writer: first reading from something published, then work in progress. And we discuss what we’ve heard. 

And boy what we’ve heard so far. Lindsay Clarke, an entirely fitting writer to launch Off the Shelf, gave a profound exposition of where writing comes from, why we do it and why we’re all nourished by literature. He read from his Whitbread Award winning The Chymical Wedding and his most recent work The Water Theatre. Jemima Hunt read from her emotional thriller The Late Arrival and, as an agent for the Writers Practice talked about the processes of getting published. We had Jake Wallis Simons and his enriching novel the English German Girl. Its subject, the Kindertransport of WW2, meant, of course, that discussion turned to the difficulties and emotional challenges of this subject matter. Check out the podcasts made from each talk.

After lunch is brilliant too. More readings in the restaurant, but this time from the audience, with the writer of the day helping others realise their own works. Its lovely, all of it, and we have the help and support of Fiction Uncovered to make it happen. So check out the spring programme (below).

21 December 2011
Posted in Film

Guild member Paul Laverty speaking at the Bafta earlier this month as part of their Screewriters' Lectures series

A full version of the talk is also available, as well as a full transcript.

19 December 2011
Posted in TV

The Writers’ Guild has agreed an increase of 2% in minimum fees for drama and comedy writers, in line with pay rises for BBC staff. This brings the flagship minimum fee for a 60-minute original drama to £10,680 – although many established and in-demand writers will earn much higher amounts. The minimum rates for series, soaps and other genres all go up by the same percentage. The new rates cover all contracts from 1 November 2011 - download a full list of minimum rates (pdf).

The Guild, along with the agents’ trade body the Personal Managers’ Association has now concluded all substantive negotiations on a new suite of agreements that will introduce a new system of paying writers for the use of their work on the iPlayer and other online on-demand services including the planned BBC online archive. The deal also expands the coverage of the agreements to scripts shorter than 15 minutes, including comedy sketches, material commissioned for online use only, and some material for animations and documentaries. We expect to make a major announcement about the new agreements early in the New Year.

The negotiations and increased fees come against a background of yet more BBC cuts under the slogan 'Delivering Quality First'. The latest plans identify 'Ambitious original British drama and comedy' among the 'five pillars of the BBC’s future strategy' and the Guild intends to monitor commissions and output closely to ensure this pledge is honoured.

19 December 2011
Posted in TV

Gail Renard (pictured with Armando Iannucci) reports from the British Comedy Awards

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain was proud to be part of the British Comedy Awards once again. The recipient of our “Outstanding Achievement In Writing Award” was Armando Iannucci. As the standing ovation on the night proved, the choice was a worthy one.

Armando Iannucci has been responsible for such ground-breaking shows as The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge and The Thick Of It and manage to fit in the libretto for an opera, Skin Deep as well. How could the Guild not honour a man who gave us Malcolm Tucker?

His long-time friend and colleague, Steve Coogan, presented the Award to Armando on the night.

Congratulations also go to Guild members Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, who received an award for their new comedy series, Fresh Meat; Victoria Wood who was named Best Female Comic and Dave Cohen who scored not one but two wins for Horrible Histories and Have I Got News For You. Some people can just be too talented.

Gail Renard is Chair of the Guild's TV Committee

14 December 2011
Posted in Film

Robin Squire's cautionary tale for screenwriters

Back in 1996 a producer told me he knew a woman who wanted her unpublished story developing into a feature film. 'She’s not in the business and she’s not a writer,' he advised, 'but she needs a script to get things moving.'

Being moderately-to-suicidally under-employed at the time, I agreed to have a go. Her ‘story’ was no more than a rambly outline, but I could see the possibilities. Not till after some financial skirmishing did a modest sum change hands, for, well-shod as the lady was, it seemed not to have occurred to her that any payment might be involved.

So off I went. My agent showed my early draft to a bankable director, who said yes. A money-hunting young producer came aboard, then a sales agent, line producer and casting director. A deal was done, a contract signed, all was looking rosy and my bank manager’s eye was starting to lose its glazed expression.

However, it wasn’t long before I became aware of, like phantoms in a graveyard, the figurative corpses of other writers who had been similarly ‘hired’ by this in every other way charming and delightful woman. If I’d hoped for a smooth transition from page to screen I was in for a protracted time of tortuous and torturous disillusionment to the point where I felt like the bemused writer played by Alexei Sayle in the Comic Strip’s film The Strike, who ended up hurling his typewriter away. And then, as inevitably as a creeping virus, it became apparent that although the industry professionals involved were happy enough with my script, the lady was not. Furthermore, she had decided to be the screenwriter herself, despite the trifling disadvantage of never having written anything before.

Parallel with these disturbing developments I chanced to meet a glamorous young actress/singer, down on her luck, handing out leaflets in the street for a temp agency, and became drawn into her very different world of entertainment. Older than her as I was, we nonetheless struck up a companionship which in time developed into something more as life played its vindictive games with two freelancing souls instead of just the one, and so drew us together.

Her dynamic musical trio subsequently nearly made the big-time, attracting a hot showbiz manager, with their first gig at the London Palladium and Decca standing by with a recording contract. But, as with the ‘Britflick’, there was a fatal flaw attached. After high heady hopes on her part, the group split up and she found herself entertaining solo in lunch clubs and Care Homes for the Elderly throughout southern England to scrape a living income, during which experience – despite my terminal shyness which makes me more suited to joining a silent brotherhood who only meet at mealtimes and even then sit with their backs to each other, I became part of her act, introducing her on the microphone, telling gags and eventually singing duets with her on a journey of personal discovery that turned my increasingly beleaguered world on its head in a whole new way.

07 December 2011
Posted in Video Games

On 28 October a panel of professional games writers gathered at BAFTA to discuss narrative in video games development. The panelists included; Writers' Guild member Rhianna Pratchett (Heavenly Sword, the Overlord series, Mirror’s Edge), Jim Swallow (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Killzone 2) and Ed Stern (Brink, The Enemy Territory games). The event was chaired by Writers' Guild member Andrew Walsh (X3:Reunion, Prince of Persia, and Medieval II: Total War). Listen to this podcast to hear the full conversation unfold. (Please note, this podcasts contains language that is unsuitable for a younger audience).

Writing for Games: Panel Debate by BAFTA

07 December 2011
Posted in General

Bill Morrison – playwright, director, producer, actor, screenwriter and former Chair of the Writers’ Guild – died in Liverpool this morning after a sudden illness. He was 71. Many people in the Guild and the wider world of writing and the theatre will mourn his loss.

Bill was widely known for his work, much of which dealt with the troubles of his native Northern Ireland, and for his involvement with the Everyman in Liverpool, among other theatres. But the Guild also knew him as a strong leader, able to focus his experience and intellect on guiding his union through some troubles of its own.

Guild President David Edgar writes:

Bill Morrison's death is a loss to the theatre (for which he not only wrote but also acted and directed), to television and radio, to the Writers' Guild and indeed to the principle of writers' unionisation.

I met him in the late 1970s when we were both founder members of the Theatre Writers' Union, which collaborated with the Guild in negotiating the first minimum-terms agreements for writers in the British theatre. Bill remained a stalwart TWU activist, and was a key figure - firm but wise - in the sometimes tortuous and occasionally tempestuous negotiations for the TWU to join the Guild. Following a successful merging in 1997, Bill went on to the Guild executive and was its chair from 2001 to 2003.

His career as a writer began in the late 1960s. Abandoning his university subject of law in order to go on the stage, Bill quickly refocussed his attention on to writing, undertaking writing residencies at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent and the Liverpool Everyman, for which he wrote his hugely successful black farce about the Northern Ireland troubles, Flying Blind, which was revived at the Royal Court in London, produced off-Broadway and then around the world.

Another comedy about the land of his birth (though in this case set in Liverpool), Scrap!, was one of the plays produced under a rare period of writer power in the theatre. Facing closure in 1981, the Liverpool Playhouse Board appointed Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Chris Bond and Bill as joint artistic directors. A not always easy collaboration nonetheless saved the theatre, produced premiere productions of plays by Jimmy McGovern, Claire Luckham, Nell Dunn and Adrian Henri, and Willy Russell's legendarily successful Blood Brothers. After Russell and Bleasdale left, Bill carried on as joint artistic director until 1985, and as a board member till 1991. In 1993 he returned to the theme of the Irish troubles with his most considerable stage project, a three-play family drama beginning with partition in the 1920s and ending in the present, directed by Nick Kent at the Tricycle.

Bill also wrote widely for television, his best-known single plays being Shergar, Force of Duty and A Safe House, a play about the wrongful imprisonment of the Maguire family in the 1970s. His radio work, much of it produced by the formidable John Tydeman, includes an innovative two-part adaptation of Crime and Punishment and a series of five Raymond Chandler novels, as well as many original plays.

Bill will also be remembered as a staunch defender of the theatre (particularly in Liverpool), as a community writer (bringing victims of IRA bombings together on both sides of the Irish sea) and as a trade unionist. His period as chair of the Guild saw difficult negotiations with the BBC and conflict with the Guild's partners, as well as the appointment of Bernie Corbett as General Secretary. His role in the expansion of the Guild's remit to cover all theatre writers is also a lasting legacy.

Bill had been combatting illness for some years, but had been improving over the last two, before a sudden rupture of the oesophagus caused his death last Wednesday. His final public engagement was the launch of a book about the first 100 years of the Liverpool Playhouse, to which he made such an important contribution. His partner, Ann Bates, is a drama teacher with whom Bill worked in his latter years, and he also leaves a daughter (Tilly) and a son (Patrick). He will be missed by them, but also by us.