13 November 2011
Posted in
TV
An edited transcript of a Writers' Guild podcast
I suppose the first thing we’d better check is whether you’re happy with the term ‘soap’ because sometimes people prefer to talk about continuing drama - I know the executives seem to - rather than soap. What do you think?
Chris Thompson: It doesn’t bother me too much. I think I’m not too precious about it really. It is what it is isn’t it. And it is continuing drama but if soap’s a useful shorthand then so be it. It doesn’t offend me.
Dawn Harrison: I’ve always thought of it as a soap.
How did you come to be writing for TV?
Dawn Harrison: I started off as a teacher and then I became a youth worker. When my kids were little I started writing - children’s fiction to start with but I found it a lot easier to get good feedback about the television stuff I was writing. So I wrote a couple of original scripts for kids, teenagers, sent those off and that led to being invited to pitch stories for Doctors, which I did. I was very lucky and got eight episodes in my first year. So it was a fairly easy decision to give up being a teacher, being a youth worker, and do it as my full-time job.
Chris Thompson: I was also a teacher and I became a Deputy Head of a big comprehensive school. Then I realised that I was moving further away from teaching English and Drama, which is what I began doing. I started writing plays for kids and I sent various scripts off to television companies, all of which were rejected. And I entered a competition in the Radio Times to write a half-hour radio drama/comedy with the potential to be a series. That was in 1985. It didn’t win but it was shortlisted and it got me the chance to produce a radio drama at Manchester. I didn’t give up the day job straight away. I had two small children and was the main breadwinner. But over the next three years I sold another five radio plays so I had a bit of a CV. I gave up teaching in 1989 and within two years I got a job on a daytime soap called Families, which was Kay Mellor’s first show. I didn’t have an agent. I blundered in – this is how not to do it by the way. Roy Barraclough (who played Alec Gilroy in Coronation Street) was in my second radio play. And when I decided I’d try and get into television I wrote him a letter asking him to pass on my details to a television producer. Which he did. Granada were having a workshop for writers to work on Coronation Street and though I didn’t get that job, two or three of us were given a job on Families. One of my contemporaries on that was Sally Wainwright, who’s obviously gone on to great things. From then onwards I did a lot of work with Granada over the years. I also fitted in a stint on The Archers and in 1996 I joined Emmerdale.
Could you talk a little bit more about how necessary it is to give up your full-time job, and how difficult a decision that was?
Dawn Harrison: There are a lot of Doctors’ writers who don’t do it as a full-time job. A few of them only have a few episodes a year and it’s perfectly possible. I was doing a jobshare job as a youth worker so for me it was quite easy to give that up and just do Doctors full-time. But I went onto Holby City very early, after just three episodes of Doctors and that was a huge culture shock. I had no idea really of the kind of rigour and the drafting and re-drafting that was required and I really found that very hard.
Chris Thompson: I’d had quite a successful teaching career and I was faced with the prospect that the next move would be to be a Head or an advisor or something like that. I’d got a track record in radio and I decided that in order to break into television, which I wanted to do, I’d have to give it serious attention. So I gave up my secure pension and salary. I did a little bit of part-time teaching, just so I was earning something and I became the house-husband. I was working from home, so I was able to take our kids to school and then after two years I got my breakthrough into television. For the first year when I wasn’t really earning very much, I used to look in the top drawer of my desk see my final salary slip as a teacher. I used to get that every month. Gosh! But I mean once I got into television and got regular work then that ceased to be an issue.
How useful do you think that background as a teacher has been for you as a writer?
Chris Thompson: It’s been useful on two levels I think. You do have a certain amount of life experience. I was in my 30s when I sold my first radio play. So you’ve had children, you’ve got married, you’ve done the job that isn’t just in a nice cosy studio or a theatre, you know some not-so-cosy places. And, secondly, the nature of the job that Dawn and I do involves script conferences where you have to sit round a table and argue your case for a particular story or a particular character. And because teaching by definition involves contact with all sorts of people every day of your working life, that I think gave me a certain confidence in terms of being able to pitch stories, fight my corner, and join in the general merry mayhem that is a script conference.
Dawn, you’re writing for Emmerdale at the moment and you have written for Doctors, as you said - how different are they to work on?
Dawn Harrison: Really different. You know Doctors has I think about ten regular characters as opposed to Emmerdale which has over 60. In Doctors you have your story of the day which is normally about 60% of the episode. And that will always be your spine, so you’re always writing around a story, which is very different to doing your little bit of a story document. Emmerdale at the moment has about 24 writers, so you’re involved every month. You go to a conference every month and discuss the upcoming month’s storylines for days. We also talk about the episodes that we’ve got commissioned that month to just iron out any things that we don’t understand. The contracted writers with Doctors are invited up in a rotation, but in my experience that means you might go every couple of years, so it’s not the same at all.
So the monthly conference a place where you can pitch ideas, pitch characters to some extent or how characters develop as well?
Chris Thompson: The focus of a conference is usually story. But three or four times a year where we go away from the studio in Leeds to a rather nice hotel in Harrogate - mainly so the producers get away from being on call every minute -and then we look at bigger stories. We also regularly review the character mix that we have and look at who’s working, who isn’t, which actors may have decided not to renew their contracts and which actors you feel shouldn’t renew their contracts, which is a tough thing to do. So you look at the mix. And we get research as well at most long-term conferences which tells us not how popular characters are but what sort of impact they have on the audience. ‘Which of these characters would you switch on to watch?’ And it’s gratifying to know that some of our long-standing characters are so well loved by our audience and they come in the top ten time and time again. And also, if you’ve brought in a new character, it’s very helpful to know whether they’ve made an impact or not.
So it really is about character? Character and story?
Chris Thompson: Yes, and if we’re going to have a new character somebody has to come up with that character or that family group. Sometimes whole families come in which is very tough to do. If somebody pitches a particular character they will often go away and write a brief biography and explain where they feel they can fit in the show and what gap they fill. We also look at the mix of gender and age, and make sure we’ve got as many bases covered as possible. I could throw in sexuality and ethnicity as well - there’s a whole lot of different things go into the mix. On a show like Emmerdale there’s a huge amount for writers to take on board: 60 characters, six episodes a week. How challenging is that when you first start?
Dawn Harrison: Very! I’ve been on the show for just over a year and it’s only now that I’m kind of getting used to the whole rhythm of the month - looking at the deadlines and working out when you’ve got free days, when you can actually do stuff as opposed to working all the time. And the stamina that you need for conferences as well, to k maintain two days of talking - and going out with the other writers as well! But the regularity is fantastic and being part of a team is what I’ve wanted to do as a writer ever since I started, and it’s what most writers don’t ever get to do. You know you write at home in front of your computer and we all talk about wanting to be part of a team. But when you’re working on a soap you actually get that.
And is there contact between the writers away from those conferences?
Dawn Harrison: Oh yes, it’s great. We sometimes send each other scripts and iron out problems between ourselves.
Chris Thompson: I absolutely agree with Dawn about the team aspect of it because writing can be a very isolated and lonely job. The Emmerdale conference table is quite sociable and non-combative. I mean obviously people get passionate about stories, but it rarely tips over into anything unpleasant. There are stories of other conference tables through the years about which that couldn’t be said, but that’s never really been my experience at Emmerdale, and it wasn’t at The Archers when I was on that show as well. But it can be a hostile environment and it can be a challenging environment and some people don’t like that bit of the job.
In terms of the actual writing, do you just get used to the rhythm of writing a 20-minute script or does each episode feel different?
Dawn Harrison: The thing about writing for soaps is that you’ve just got to tell your bit. You’ve got the storyline document and the knack is to extract as much juice as you can from what you’ve been told to do. What’s really hard is gaging how far you’re supposed to go or when it’s better to hold back - I think for the editors they can only really tell you that when they’ve got the whole block of scripts in and they can read it and let you know whether to crank a scene up, or take it down a notch. So you have to be really flexible and be able to make quite precise changes. Chris Thompson: Soaps do work within quite narrow constrictions. There used to be a rule, which I think thankfully is broken now, that every episode would begin at breakfast time and finish sometime in the evening. And obviously if it’s an ITV show you have to make sure you build up to the ad break so that people don’t drift away to put the kettle on and then not come back. When I’ve written 60-minute dramas I’ve found that one is able to be a bit more flexible in terms of technique. So you can use jump cuts, for instance. You can show a character walking out of the door and then the next scene you can pick them up at the other side of town or knocking on their ex-wife’s front door or whatever. Soap doesn’t allow for that. If a character leaves the Woolpack he or she can’t pitch up at the farm in the next scene. Even the scene after the next scene, there’s this notion that you have to have allowed enough time for characters to get from A to B, which I find actually quite frustrating, but it’s part of the convention.
Dawn Harrison: I don’t think you’re supposed to have more than two hours between scenes are you?
Chris Thompson: Yes, that’s right.
Dawn Harrison: One of the editors told me. I didn’t know that rule. But apparently that’s a rule.
Chris Thompson: On the other hand a few years ago I actually was able to write a two-hander between Ashley the vicar and Bernice his first wife where their marriage was in meltdown. And I wrote it in real time: it was a 30-minute drama and it covered 30 minutes of action. That was really fun and really exciting to do. But often there are constraints. When I first started on The Archers, it might have changed now, but you had to write five scenes with seven characters. One at least of the scenes had to be agricultural or in the open air and you had to interweave the seven characters so that it wasn’t just three or four separate bubbles. That seems incredibly constrained. And you had to get the agricultural content in, in an organic way. I always used to set it against something domestic like making a cup of tea or changing a tyre. Otherwise it just sounds like great wadges of research that’s been parachuted in. So soap does have very, very rigid conventions and I would like to see a bit more flexibility with things like jump cuts, just to shake it up a bit.
It seems like a good time to mention Chris that you have written a book about writing soap which obviously you’ve been giving it quite a lot of thought recently. This is the book Writing Soap: How To Write Continuing Drama by Chris Thompson. But before we get back into a couple more questions leading from what you have just said, tell me a little bit about that book. Why you came to write it and who’s it for, what are you hoping people will get from it?
Chris Thompson: Yes, I was actually approached – I was just telling Dawn before we arrived – I was actually approached four years ago. I think it was the fourth previous producer on Emmerdale and I cleared it with her. Is it okay, I’ve been approached to do this book. And then over the previous four years there had been a catalogue of mishaps involving contracts, copyrights, illnesses, and so it’s finally gone into print earlier this year. Because of my teaching background I occasionally get invited to do bits of guest lecturing, visiting lecturing, on various university courses, undergraduate and postgraduate level. So I suppose one of the potential audiences is just that, are people who are perhaps undertaking a course of study at university and have aspirations to write for television at some point. And the publishing house that’s published the book does tend to specialise in study guides and creative writing guides. So it’s really just I suppose an extension of what we’re talking about now. It’s a way of opening up some of the secrets really, taking a lid off some of the nitty-gritty things that you do. So what I’ve tried to do is to take people right from day one – I’d like to write for a soap, how do I do it? And now I’m in the soap, what is involved? And it covers things like the conference, the receipt of a storyline document, turning that into a scene breakdown, scene breakdown into a first draft, and then going through the editing process and coming out the other end. So that by, I would like to think, the end of the book people will have been through it from A to Z and at least have some idea about how the thing works. When I first delivered my first sample chapter, it was much more chatty and anecdotal. It was: guess what happened round the conference table. Did you hear the one about the actor at the soap awards? But I realised that that wasn’t what was quite required and so therefore it’s a much more structured study-based approach really and that’s the thinking behind it.
What is it do you think that makes a soap writer succeed? What skills and attributes do they need to have?
Dawn Harrison: The most important this is probably the ability to retain your own original voice really. You get chosen for a soap by sending in a sample script and I think they’re looking for something that just stands out – we call it colour, colour and sparkle we refer to a lot. Those are a lot of the notes that we get, you know: ‘make this more interesting’, ‘make it fresher’, which means really dig into that story document and find something that hasn’t been said before. Which means you have to think your way into it and imagine yourself there and not just fall into recreating conversations that they’ve had before. You have to really find an interesting angle. And that’s all about you as a writer I think; your ability to do that and to deliver.
Because the goal is for every episode to stand out rather than just to continue parts of a story?
Dawn Harrison: Yes and as a writer you can really tell when you’re watching each other’s episodes, which ones do stand out. I don’t know if the general public do, but I mean as a writer you can certainly look and listen and think, oh that’s interesting, I wish I’d written that line.
And do you find that if you see a particularly good episode, that makes you want to raise your own game as well?
Dawn Harrison: Yes. The thing that most inspires me writing for Emmerdale is watching other people’s episodes. So if ever I’m feeling a bit flat I just watch the latest batch of DVDs and I’m bound to find something on there that gets me going again.
Chris Thompson: I think that of you talk to most writers, whether they’re writing novels or short stories or drama, there’s that moment in your life when you find your voice. It’s a little bit of a cliché but nevertheless it’s true. I can remember exactly when I did that and it was my first radio play. And, as Dawn said, you get a job on one of those long-running shows by having a voice. And then the trick is to conform to the overall shape and voice and texture of the show, but to retain that little bit of you-ness, of individuality that means, as Dawn said, when you see each other’s work you can think, ah yes that’s excellent, that’s working, I really like that. And that’s a tough thing to do. You could join up the dots, you could just lift great wadges of sentences from the storyline document but you wouldn’t last very long if you did that.
Dawn Harrison: Yes, precisely. You can never really have a work-a-day line. Every line should be worked on and there for a reason.
Chris Thompson: And we should point out that because of the way the scripts go through the drafting process you can actually be working on anything from three to six scripts at any one time. Because by the time you’ve delivered your first draft of one script, you’ll have probably been commissioned to write another. And sometimes because of the number of scripts, and if some writers are taking a break, you might get a double episode. You might be in a position where you get three doubles in a row, so you might actually be working on six different scripts at six different stages of development. And then of course you’ve got the last minute thing when you think the script has been put to bed, when the phone call comes and says, so-and-so’s ill and can’t shoot tomorrow. Can you re-write that scene with X and you have to put another character in.
Dawn Harrison: It’s great that you get the opportunity to do that. Emmerdale is the only show I’ve ever worked on where a writer will be phoned up at the eleventh hour to say rewrite that scene. In other shows they just do that for you. I had an edit the other day with an editor who just phoned up for every single line and it was great. It’s really respectful.
Chris Thompson: Yes, there are some shows where it all gets rewritten by the script editor.
Given how challenging it is creatively and in terms of the time commitment, I wonder if you find time or other sorts of writing away from soap?
Chris Thompson: When I first started on Emmerdale it was three episodes a week, there were twelve writers and we met every three weeks when nine episodes were commissioned. So every fourth block you were free. So I carried on doing a lot of radio work and I did other television work. Then it went to five episodes a week, and now it’s six episodes a week. One or two of our colleagues writes novels and short stories, and a couple of other people do other things. But it’s become increasingly difficult to keep that other sort of writing alive. I’ve found that personally anyway, and I think it’s probably true of most of our colleagues. If you want to do something else really the best option is to ask for time off.
Dawn Harrison: I do Tracey Beaker Returns as well, which is two episodes for each series. But it’s on a longer timescale and I’ve been able to do that alongside Emmerdale. I went through a period when I had about 15 original treatments out at one stage, so there’s something really satisfying about actually writing scripts for Emmerdale that go out every month. As a writer I think you’re always tinkering about with stuff but I am enjoying writing for Emmerdale and enjoying the regularity.
Chris Thompson: And it is very satisfying to have your work seen by millions of people. That’s why we do it, because we want people to see what we’ve written or hear what we’ve written. And there’s something very gratifying about that, as Dawn said. And it’s exciting, no question. Lovely job.
