Less than an hour ago I received an email from people associated with A Popular Evening Drama confirming that the sample script I’d written at their request was not going to be commissioned. Sigh. There were some positive noises made about the script I wrote, but bottom line is that’s the end of that particular adventure, at least for the foreseeable future.

So, what do I learn from that experience? Well, it confirms the difficulty of getting onto Britain’s top television dramas, which is no great surprise. I learned a lot planning and writing that script, and thoroughly enjoyed the process of doing so. The lessons I’ve learned about writing in a more linear fashion than I’m used to will be of real value in the future: having to stay with a story because that’s the way the show works, rather than cutting away to another plot as I’d often be inclined to do, stretched me in useful ways.

I’m also confident that I did a creditable job at writing some established characters, staying faithful to their personalities as previously portrayed and hopefully playing with them a little to show some of their less familiar aspects. And I can honestly say that I did the best possible job I could on the script, which is the most important thing. Of course, that raises an awkward question: if my best possible job wasn’t good enough, can I actually write to the standard required of shows such as A Popular Evening Drama?

Hmm. Yes, that really is an awkward question. And my gut answer is ‘Of course I can write for those shows, and more importantly write ones better still when I’m writing what I want instead of being constrained by someone else’s characters and format‘. Which then begs the question of how I get the opportunity to get those shows seen by anyone if I don’t first go through the hoops required to script existing programmes.

See how easy it is to get sidetracked into notions that can undermine your confidence? Fortunately I’ve been here before, and am robust enough to take it on the chin, drawing on feedback I’ve got from people who’ve read various scripts and commented favourably on them. Plus, damnit, I’ve been commissioned before and I’ll be commissioned again. Right now, a small and cool production company are asking me to write a feature, and another interesting outfit are waiting for a treatment for a tv drama from me…so all is not lost. And beyond those immediate prospects, there are two people wanting me to write features with them, and some animators asking me to develop a multi-platform concept.

So: the non-appearance of A Popular Evening Drama commission is a setback, but it doesn’t stop me in my tracks. At this point, I seriously doubt anything could: I’ve been in much much worse situations before now and come up smelling of roses, and that notion of rebound is hardwired now. I bounce back.

Plus, if I look at the statistics concerning this situation, I’m reassured. I know how many people were asked at the same time as I was to write sample scripts, and I know how many people are being brought onboard. Sorry to be vague there, but I don’t want to risk compromising confidentiality for anyone involved in the project.

So it goes. I’ve enjoyed and learned from watching A Popular Evening Drama these last few months, and will continue to do so. And, as ever, I’m waiting to hear back regarding another application which could do my career the world of good…or, maybe you’ll be reading another post like this one in a couple of months.

I had lunch with a writer friend today, and it turns out he’s increasingly seeing himself as a filmmaker rather than a screenwriter. He’s just completed a short course in direction, and he views his future career as one in which he will be the producer and perhaps director of his own scripts. It’s an absolutely valid route for some people, and I absolutely understand why he’s taken that decision – but is it for me?

A few years ago I filmed a pilot for a regional short film scheme, so I would have the bones of a showreel to present to the panel. It was something I learned a lot from. The piece was around 80 seconds long, an extract from the ten minute film I planned to make, and thinking it through from story to script to visual style to performances and sound was a fascinating experience.

Some aspects of making that sequence came to me more naturally than others. I was pretty good at getting the general look and feel of what I wanted in terms of still images, but found working with a camera that works in realtime and 3d space a stretch that I couldn’t cope with well at the time. Fortunately I was working with a seasoned cameraman who had directed several of his own pieces, and he was able to outline what choices I had available so I could make whichever one seemed suitable. I managed, but it was my least comfortable part of the process, and my lack of fluency with this part of what we did showed through in the finished piece.

Working with actors was a much more natural experience for me, not surprising since I’ve done it plenty of times before in a theatrical context. It helped that I’d got two talented and patient performers who I knew, and took my novice status into account. So, I was pretty happy with the performances we got.

Editing was the phase where I felt most at home. That surprised me, but I really took to it. This was my second time in an edit suite where I got to make the decisions, and I had learned valuable lessons from my first experience. Most importantly, for my approach at least, was the practice of editing in line with the soundtrack I’d chosen: the story was about the relationship between a father and daughter who connect through astronomy, and the audio backdrop came from NASA recordings of sunspots or other cosmic activities. Anyway, with the audio in place I found a rhythm to work to that suited the piece just fine, and overall it’s probably the audio and editing of that short sequence that I’m most proud of.

So, overall I found it a stressful but enjoyable experience that I liked a whole lot more when we took the raw material into the edit suite to shape it into something that, for the first time, I turned from a concept into a film, however short. And while I did enjoy that, I’m not convinced that I want to get that involved again with the mechanics of filmmaking.

More than anything, I’m someone who can come up with ideas and develop them into fully realised stories. I’ve spent many years learning how to do that, and I love doing it. Taking the next step to directing is not something I feel comfortable doing, if only because I’m not sure that I could realise my expectations in that regard. And yes, I recognise that as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but a bit of realism is no bad thing: if it’s taken me years to become happy with my ability to write a script, how long would it take for me to feel comfortable as a filmmaker? Why not instead pair up with people who are skilled in that regard and like my stories? I’m fortunate in that I know people who do have that opinion of my work, and it’d be churlish not to make the most of that situation.

That said, ‘filmmaker’ embraces the production as well as direction side of taking a concept from script to screen, and I can envisage myself getting involved in that aspect of the process for various reasons, since – to use an Old Labour analogy – it’s basically about taking control of the means of production, distribution and exchange, rather than assuming they’ll be passed on by wealthy benefactors. Maybe that aspect of what I do won’t happen for a while but, as the saying goes, watch this space…

On the face of it, ‘write what you know’ has to be the most restrictive adage to confront the would-be writer. For a start, it rules out most genre writing, assuming you’ve not been involved in a space battle, been hired to find a missing child, or swung your sword against an ogre. And given the amount of dross in genre fiction, maybe that’s not bad advice.

Only, what are we left with at that point? Dreary novels about adultery imagined and not acted on? Definitive accounts of the working lives of architects, suntan technicians and tarmac specialists with a hankering to write a novel? Stories that elevate the mundane into something not really like art? That way lies madness, or at least an endless round of Nick Hornby imitators and tales of dismal childhood…hmm, pretty much what you’ll find an abundance of in book stores.

‘Write what you know’ is not much use taken at face value then. But treated as an endorsement to write what you know about through your emotional life, it releases endless possibilities for writing. I’ve never had an archenemy, but there are a few people in my life I’d have gladly tossed off a waterfall at one point or another. I’ve never colonised an alien planet, but I’ve spent months living in another culture, one where the fact that the language was shared didn’t mean that many assumptions were. I’ve never performed on the main stage at Glastonbury with a band, but I’ve performed poetry as an amateur alongside professionals and been as well received as they were.

Very rarely do the scripts I’ve written correspond with the facts of my life. But more often than not, there are ideas that I’m passionate about, emotions I feel, concepts that matter to me. Those are as much a part of ‘what I know’ as the mere details of my life, and are much more important when it comes to writing.

I’m currently researching a tv drama set in a 1980s counterculture I’ve seen precious little drama about, let alone any that has the right feel when I compare it to my own experiences of that world and the people who inhabited it. My personal experience will be useful as a benchmark, but where the script will come alive is when I combine it with research and a compelling – fictional – story. Sure, there’s a strong element of reality to what I’m writing about, but I’m not devising a documentary and feel no obligation to be restricted to the facts as they’ve been recorded (…and in this instance, some of the relevant information has been expunged from the records of contemporary newspapers with help from security services).

Veracity without drama is lifeless. Drama without emotional veracity is empty. Tread a path where your own emotions inform the choices you make in a story, and you have the capacity to create something interesting. This, by the way, doesn’t mean wallowing in your emotions and using them as an opportunity to lament the end of your relationship with the heartless so-and-so who left you high and dry when you had a fleeting affair with their best friend. That way lies self-indulgence.

The trick here, and I’d recommend meditation classes if it doesn’t come naturally, is to shift between feeling and listening to your emotions as they were at the time, and viewing what happened with empathy for all involved. Approached in that manner, you can create rounded characters for all the parts required, rather than creating an improbably angelic version of yourself and mere puppets for anyone else.

Bloody hell, this writing lark gets pretty complicated, and into some rich psychological and philosophical territory. Well, yes. Enjoy the journey though, and please try to distinguish between a bit of necessary navel gazing and disappearing up your arse.

It’s a Bank Holiday, and that can mean only one thing. Ray Harryhausen. Growing up, the association between flying carpets, animated skeletons and minotaurs was cemented by the Harryhausen films that would be shown on tv a few times a year.

Stories about Sinbad and crew have a deep resonance with me, tapping as they do into the many hours I spent reading about the mythologies of different cultures in my early years. My principal source was a set of brown bound encyclopedias with embossed covers that had been given to my father as a child, and even then they were second hand and out of date. So by the time they got to me, I was a good fifty years behind the curve, reading about the British Empire and its great engineering and exploration feats without irony.

Some things never go out of date though, and those books are where my love of mythology kicked off. There were different sections for Norse, Greek, and Roman myth, and maybe some other cultures were included too. It’s hard to be sure because once this interest in myth was cemented, I followed it up by getting books that rounded out my collection of tales from other times and places. Usually that took me to sensible sources such as Henry Treece’s anthologies for children, but I was also led to buy a Jorge Luis Borges collection of tales about imaginary beings, pretty whacked-out for an 8 year old, but still a book I relished.

Anyway, the Ray Harryhausen films – how many movies are associated indelibly with the name of the man who provided their special effects? – only confirmed my love of all things fantastic. Better yet, they’re still films that are thoroughly enjoyable to a modern eye: this isn’t like going back to Blake’s 7; these really were great and well-executed stories.

In turn, that depiction of legend led me back to the source material, in this case the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, an anthology which I now have several editions of, and which for a while I was besotted with. I wrote a play consisting of nested stories that was my own take on those tales, and have fond memories of it being performed in a local community centre, complete with Middle Eastern buffet, DJ, singer, and lights, as well as three actors and two dancers. And I went on to adapt the central tale in that piece for a childrens’ story with an illustrator friend, only to discover that despite a noted editor loving my words and her pictures, they weren’t inclined to put the two together and publish the result. Hey ho. Another day…

One of my dream projects would be to write some new take on the Thousand and One Nights: the tales are rich, tell a lot about human nature, are full of magic, and sometimes very funny. It couldn’t, on the surface, be further away from my interest in social drama, another important strand of my writing, but I’m someone whose passions are pretty broad, and would like to spend some time on scripts related to all of them in the years ahead.

I returned home late last night, curry-plump, to find a message from my mother on the answerphone. She sounded a bit anxious, and that made sense as her story unfolded. She’d been drinking coffee with a friend at a Nando’s, when police came in and ordered everyone outside. If I tell you that this happened in Exeter, you might understand why. Mum had chosen to have her coffee next door to the venue where a mentally unstable convert to Islam had done his best to blow the town centre up with a home made bomb. Oops.

This news happened on the same day that filmmaker Terence Davies lambasted fellow British creators for following American models of film and not being true to regional British experience. This as part of the launch campaign for his latest film, yet another elegaic exploration of the Liverpool of his childhood. Not to appear too crass, but I wonder exactly how much money this film will make? I have seen some of Davies’s work and found it sensitive and moving, but common sense tells you there is a limited audience for films that feature 90 second shots of the shadows of rain playing artfully on the living room rug.

So, if we’re to make films representative of the British experience, what are we to make of my mother’s story, which comes seemingly straight from an American thriller? It was even structured like a mainstream movie, with normality (coffee with a friend) shaken by an inciting incident a few minutes in (the police telling everyone to leave), before mum and everyone else were moved first to one point, then to another (two chunks of the second act) before returning home shocked but safe (third act).

Acts of terrorism have no respect for parochial aesthetics. And neither should filmmakers. We live in an interconnected world, where a web of influences play on one another in a fashion that no individual can comprehend. So instead, we simplify, and live within our own edited version of the world at large. In Terence’s case, it seems he’s still stuck in 1950s Liverpool.

Thankfully, other British filmmakers have found ways of capturing something to say about the world we live in now: Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things is a masterful examination of the effects of migration in Britain’s capital city. Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland explores modern family relationships against a complex metropolitan backdrop. Shane Meadows has brought the underside of the East Midlands to the screen on several occasions, from his shorts such as the wonderful Where’s The Money Ronnie to his last feature This Is England. So, let’s not pretend that contemporary British filmmakers aren’t interested in the country they’re from. Even films that have an effectively American model of storytelling, such as Paul Andrew Williams’s brilliant thriller London to Brighton, still bring a distinctly British turn to the proceedings.

Yes, there is another side to British filmmaking, present in the James Bond films, in anything featuring Hugh Grant, and in costumed dramas, but those films are an equally valid part of the country’s cinematic culture – and unlike Terence Davies’s oeuvre are likely to be the ones that make the money that enable producers to take risks on edgier propositions. Let’s not forget, Davies’s work owes its existence to the arts equivalent of another grand British institution – the welfare state. And long may that be the case…but please don’t suggest that your preferred style of filmmaking is the best in a world as complex, as fascinating, as rich in story, as we all inhabit in the 21st century.

Irony in screenwriting isn’t about the characters wisecracking in a dry and knowing way. Knowing is part of it, sure, but the knowing in question is the relationship between what the character knows and what the audience know. It’s a dance, and controlling it enables the writer to control pace and tension in the film effectively.

Thrillers in particular work according to who knows what, when. If an audience knows in advance that the sheriff the protagonist opens up to is allied with the bad guys, then everything the sheriff says and does will be loaded with that knowledge. In turn, that creates empathy for the protagonist’s predicament when the sheriff, say, offers to put the hero up in a cell for the night, to save him from his pursuers.

Writing in this manner calls for control of point of view at all times. Always seeing a story from the perspective of one character is one valid choice – others add fascinating complications. In the example just used, if the hero discovers the truth about the sheriff when, the morning after he accepts the offer to stay in the cell, the bad guys turn up, that’s one perfectly valid way of telling the story.

But imagine how much more tension can be wrung out of the situation if you know that the sheriff is in contact with the bad guys, acts sympathetically to the hero, and realises the financial payoff he can make by selling him to the villains. It turns the sheriff from a fairly bland character into one making important choices affecting the hero’s destiny, all the while as the hero accepts the sheriff’s friendship. You can twist it further still: what if the sheriff ultimately decides to side with the hero, even after he’s arranged to sell him to the bad guys? The story options multiply, as the hero is faced with the potential of eluding his pursuers, and he and the sheriff have to concoct a way of him getting away that leaves the sheriff looking as if he still sides with the bad guys.

And so on…The point here is that allowing your story to have several viewpoints allows you to increase the jeapordy of what’s happening in all kinds of interesting ways. And it doesn’t just apply to thrillers. How about a romcom? Let’s say the guy with the hots for the woman is told seconds before they converse for the first time that she despises men of his profession…That gives the scene a frisson it would otherwise have lacked, and reveals something about his character according to the way he responds to this news (does he lie about his job, or defend himself in a way that seems excessive?), just by adding a little piece of dialogue from a third party.

Or horror: a character has been bitten by a vampire, but thinks she won’t become one herself because there was just the one bite. Cut to another scene in which a priest says that vampire victims only become vampires themselves if the bite happened on a full moon, at which point the viewer remembers that the attack did indeed happen when the moon was full in the night sky. In that instance, the audience had the information all along, and it becomes knowledge only in the context of a later revelation.

Alfred Hitchcock was a master at parcelling out information to the audience to hook them into stories and empathise with or change their allegiances to different characters as the film went on. It’s a vital part of the screenwriter’s toolbox, and one which I believe is best learned by experimenting with different ways of approaching the same story. And if you can find a way of doing so that works with Hitchcock’s mastery, then I want to see your script reach the screen.

A lot of people think of character and plot as separate categories. That’s never a view that’s made much sense to me. We know people by their actions, the choices they make, and it’s those actions that create a sense of what kind of people they are.

The pilot episode of Six Feet Under features the death of the family’s undertaker father. The death itself is a revelation of character: he throws a cigarette out of the vehicle window after being chastised by his wife over the phone for smoking, then almost instantly lights another one. As he bends to ignite it, he misses the bus that’s headed towards his hearse, which sends it spinning and him dead. Character is incident.

Next, we get to see his family and their response to this catastrophic event. One son is having sex with a stranger in an airport when he hears the news, and his obvious sorrow leads to a significant story development as the woman he’s banging, who up until now wouldn’t even share her name, agrees to drive him home. The other son is stoic as he takes the news on board, but then lits rip at someone when it all gets too much for him, causing upset. The daughter has just smoked crystal meth for the first time, making it even more difficult to process what’s going on. All choices that reveal character.

People don’t have a consistent character. We change according to context: who we’re with, what we’re doing. Some things may remain consistent, but other facets will become apparent over time. I make full use of this obvious observation in the pilot episode I’ve written for a tv series I’ve devised: one particular character is shown and talked about in a way that suggests she’s ineffective, but it’s just the same character who — barely stopping to think about it — defuses a dangerous situation spontaneously when she’s seen later. Is she a flake? Is she capable? Or does she exhibit different traits at different times?

As well as his LSD exploits, psychologist Timothy Leary devised a very interesting way of looking at people through a model that he described as ‘neurological circuits’. He proposed that there are 8 such circuits, each of which can be distinctively imprinted by formative experiences through our lives. The first governs our perception of the world as safe or dangerous. The second, our relative degree of submission or dominance. The third, our capacity to process logical and symbolic thinking. The fourth, our morality and sexuality. The remaining four circuits are associated with experiences that not everyone recognises, including relationship with time, and capacity to override the ’settings’ of previous circuits.

I find the 8 circuit model a fascinating way of exploring what makes people tick, devoid of the simplistic assumptions of Freudian thinking, overly concerned as they are with sexuality. It’s not ‘true’, but it’s certainly useful, and Leary’s collaborator Robert Anton Wilson writes interestingly — and with practical exercises to bring the model to life — in books including Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising.

The beauty of the 8 circuit model is it is a model of character based on behaviour, and not theory. Never mind that your mother took the spoon away, that teacher made you stand outside the staff room: what are you doing and what does that suggest about the interaction of your neurological circuitry? It’s a model that is refreshingly free of value judgment, unlike many other psychological frameworks. As such, I believe it to be a great asset to writers: it’s our job to create convincing characters, not moralise about them…as far as I’m concerned anyway. (A lot more interesting to present a character and their actions in a rounded and honest way, than to paint a halo or horns on them from the word go, I believe: I like characters it’s not easy to pin down, not obvious cyphers for the writer’s preferred worldview.)

Go to a cafe, a bar, or somewhere else you can watch people. What do you see and hear them doing that fits with previous things they’ve done? What does that say about them? What do you see and hear them doing that confounds your expectations? How do you have to update your model to take this new data into account, and what does it suggest about them? It’s in this relationship with your perceptions and models of how people operate that you can see characterisation at work, and the better you get at experiencing people in this way, the more interesting your characters will become, to write and to watch.

Another day, another fascinating thriller with a lot going on. This time it’s Sexy Beast, which I saw tonight for the first time since recognising its homoerotic aspects, and this time came across as a rich dark study of male power and sexuality.

Ray Winstone is Gal, a criminal who’s retired to Spain. Thinks he’s retired, that is. Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley, has other ideas. Yes, we’re in a ‘one last job’ story, but superbly scripted by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, one which gets inside the minds of some beautifully and convincingly twisted characters.

It all kicks off with Ray Winstone sunning himself outside his hacienda when a boulder comes crashing down the hill and into his pool. It foreshadows Ben Kingsley’s entrance: he’s a psychotic gangster determined to get Ray to take part in a job in London. Only, there’s more to it than that. Before Kingsley sets eyes on Winstone he sees Winstone’s pool boy, the pool itself being symbolic of the love that exists between Gal and his partner Dee (it features a tiled heart design at the bottom). And as the pool’s guardian, the teenager later tries to defend Gal from Don, as well as being the subject of Don’s envy. All subtly painted, but undeniably there.

Don is a gloriously deranged creation, equal parts vile and violent, and wonderfully conflicted about his feelings for Gal. At the very least he resents that Gal has left his mates in the lurch and has no contact with them any more. And there’s plenty more to it, as there is more generally within the underworld that Gal thought he’d left behind. Some of the characters, including Ian McShane, the Mr Big behind the robbery that Don wants Gal to be part of, are bisexual. And when the heist itself takes place, the screen is awash with near-naked men swimming underwater to get the booty they crave.

Sexy Beast is head and shoulders above the empty posturing of the other Brit gangster films that were so prevalent for a while, an incisive and elegant dissection of the intersection of criminality and masculinity. And lest that sound too pompous, it’s also wonderfully directed (by Jonathan Glazer), superbly acted, very funny, and well scored. More than anything, it shows the capacity of genre material to work as a way of exploring big ideas – especially ones that were implicit in older, more naive, takes on storytelling in the same genre.

I’m thinking of thrillers at the moment. Not regulation thrillers where the action purrs like the engine of a high performance car to an inevitable conclusion, but the sort where you’re not quite sure what’s going on at times, and maybe the writer or director have an agenda beyond the base requirements of the genre. Insomnia and Memento would be good examples, and the one I’ve just watched is Inside Man.

Spike Lee is a director I’ve admired without loving for some time, and Inside Man does nothing to consummate our relationship. It starts simply enough with a bank heist masterminded by Clive Owen and investigated by Denzel Washington, and adds layers of complexity as it goes. First, there’s the requisite tricksiness of the heist itself, which leads the crooks to take the bank staff and customers hostage and dress them in identical outfits. That’s interesting, but even more so is the motivation of the bad guys; just what is it they’re up to?

The fact that the cast also includes Jodie Foster tells you that the answers the audience are after probably go above and beyond the bare necessities of a thriller; that is, to thrill the audience. And Spike Lee being the director means that there’s sure to be a larger game afoot, and so it proves. We discover that the bank itself was started with Nazi booty looted from Jews, something that its founder Christopher Plummer would not like made public.

So, there’s the expected stuff around the mechanics of a heist, augmented with some neat business around the crooks bugging the cops, faking the death of a hostage, and so forth. All good fun that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And as the story develops, there is a sense of a bigger game being played. New York’s cultural melting pot is part of the fabric of the story. Racist attitudes to Denzel Washington’s character from a white cop, and to a Sikh hostage whose turban is forcibly removed and is disparagingly called an Arab, form part of a credible social world that Bruce Willis never has to navigate in the Die Hard films.

That element of politics and ethnicity becomes more important as the Nazi aspect of the story is made clear. It’s done with a fairly light touch, and Lee’s own status as an African American director comes into play. How many times have you seen two black cops work together? In almost any other situation, a black cop would be partnered with a white cop, but here Denzel’s character is paired with Chiwetel Ejiofor: it’s no accident.

Inside Man is not brilliant – I sense that the actors are sometimes bringing more to the characters than can be found in the script – but as an intelligent heist movie edging out of the mainstream it’s to be applauded. A brave failure is always more interesting than a mediocre success, and to call it a failure is to exaggerate its weaker points anyway.

Whatever became of the big politically-charged drama? There was a whole agitprop tradition in eighties theatre, and you can look at Boys from the Blackstuff as the humanist continuation of that spirit on television. But where did that current go next?

Bleasdale’s anger, channeled through the searing Blackstuff scripts, was directly provoked by the actions of Margaret Hilda Thatcher. With her out of the way, a lot of that ire went – but where to? The sad truth is that subsequent Labour governments have been an embarrassment to many voters on the left, as the party that created the welfare state has embraced market values and become in many ways indistinguishable from its old opponents. In the process, the Labour party has learned a lot about the media, and as it’s become more savvy about spin, the notion of sincere committed drama seems as old hat and irrelevant as standing up for free school milk.

It’s in that growth of a sophisticated media culture that answers to the question of where political writing has gone can be found. Politics and media have become ever more intertwined, and it’s impossible to treat media with the straight-faced sincerity that led to shows such as When The Boat Comes In, say. A drama about people struggling to get by in the depression as traditional industry declines…can you imagine that on tv now? And on what channel?

So, instead of drama wearing its heart on its sleeve, we have scripts that are inevitably satirical in nature since it’s impossible to do media about media without becoming aware of the ironies involved. The most striking example has got to be The Thick Of It, a dissection of the mechanics of spin and the personalities who practice it that is second to none.

Two names stand out as being able to hold a mirror to the nose of the establishment: Chris Morris and Armando Ianniuci. And it’s the fact that the mirror is held to the nose, for snorting purposes, that creates a problem: this is satire so accurate that it’s indistinguishable from the real thing, and is praised by those it parodies. It also excludes a big chunk of the audience who are not as media-literate as its creators: so how can we get a modern audience to sit through a drama with a political element that isn’t some kind of meta-response to the circus it examines?

The best answer to that comes in the work of Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott. Both have a knack for writing drama with a strong social element that is emotionally engaging, clever without being up its arse. McGovern’s been at it longer, and back in his run on Cracker there are some excellent episodes examining the state of the nation while still providing a compelling protagonist and crime hooks. Abbott’s politics started to show through in Clocking Off, a means of exploring the different social worlds orbiting a factory in the north. It was also a sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television, and McGovern has done much the same with the more recent The Street. Scratch Abbott’s Shameless, and you’ll find rich social themes underpinning the comedy-drama, and ones that don’t pay simplistic allegiance to the left: the Gallaghers look after themselves and those around them, and if that means milking the state because it’s systems are so slow and cumbersome, then so be it. You can be feckless, and give a feck.

All of this interests me because I’m about to develop a treatment for a tv drama set around a bit of fairly recent British social history that I find fascinating, and believe has a lot of relevance and resonance for the way we live now. And I’m searching for a way to write it that will allow me to include a whole bunch of necessary research and bring it alive for a modern audience, one that probably didn’t watch Our Friends In The North, but likes Spooks, that’s sort of concerned about CCTV but even more about hoodies, and is just as likely to read The Mail as The Mirror. I know it can be done: the task is to find my way through it to reach that audience and share with them my concerns about the time the story will be set, and how that relates to the world we now inhabit.