There are three whiteboards in my office. I treat them as my bosses, in the absence of flesh and blood people who will motivate and castigate me until I have done whatever it is I have committed to do: I am their bitch. One of those whiteboards is devoted to writing projects — and it’s full. Despite this, I have now added another project to the list, having come across the Wellcome Trust’s call for biomedicine-inspired film and tv treatments.

I have a fascination with science, despite rather than because of the science education I received at secondary school. It clearly worked for a lot of the other kids, but for me the succession of gym teachers, fundamentalists and alchemists wheeled out to knock some science into me was enough to do quite the opposite. But all that time, I was reading science fiction, and was excited if confused about environmental concepts as I waded through Frank Herbert’s Dune books, Asimov with the various books that included his Laws of Robotics and psychohistory, and crazed parallel world adventures in Robert Heinlein.

From time to time I read New Scientist, and have a fair smattering of popular science books on my shelves. But frankly I don’t really understand them. And I’m at peace with myself about this: I don’t need to comprehend what’s really going on. What I need is for it to inspire me. Which those books do, brilliantly. And that’s what captivated me about the Wellcome Trust’s invitation to submit — that, and the fact that they only want a 750 word treatment which could net me £5000 if I’m the lucky bunny they want to work with to develop the winning concept further.

So, I have an idea. Boy, do I have an idea. It’s a huge one, inspired by a half-remembered quote that may or may not be from James Lovelock, the Gaia guy. Or possibly Richard Dawkins. I’ll look it up in due course anyway. And the quote sets the tone beautifully for a tale I’ve bounced around with my girlfriend this afternoon — she has a zoology degree and the patience necessary to temper my improbable concepts with some cool logic and inconvenient facts. Undaunted, the idea continues to take shape, and tomorrow I plan to flesh it out in consultation with a friend who has a PhD in Genetics, who is used to these flights of fancy and seems to quite enjoy accompanying me on them. Or humours me, at any rate.

All very well, except…

So far, what I have isn’t a story. It’s a Big Idea. A bloody marvellous one as far as I’m concerned. But an idea is not a story. To become one it needs to be realised through the machinations and conflict of people. Of characters. And I’ve got someone in mind as a role model to help guide me through this process — comics writer Warren Ellis.

Ellis has a knack for turning Big Ideas into accessible and exciting fiction, and that’s what I need to be doing here. I don’t want my characters to have the aloofness of the ones in Arthur C Clarke’s work — he had a thing for the Big Idea alright, but it was the Idea that was beautiful in his work, not the depiction of it. Ellis can make an Idea come alive through people who might not be entirely credible, but who you want to believe in all the same.

I’m thinking here of Miranda Zero and Aleph in Global Frequency – the woman behind a shadowy world-saving organisation, and the woman who despatches agents to deal with the threats that jeapordise the world. Typically, the world would be threatened by something inspired by some scientific possibility that Ellis took note of in his digital travels, and — with the aid of Red Bull and deadline pressure — morphed into a fast-paced yarn where the heroes would find that they needed brains as well as fists to save the day. If I can turn my Big Idea into something as enthralling as the best issues of Global Frequency, I know I’m onto something…

I started reading 2000AD when I was around 13, I think. And I liked it a lot. Robots, dinosaurs, and war: ace! Some of the writers and artists were clearly more ambitious than others, committed to the job of creating stories for a young audience that they wouldn’t find between the pages of any other comic. Which is important: creators stretching themselves encourages readers to stretch with them. Alan Moore’s Future Shocks were ideal for my thirsty mind, and his D.R and Quinch a lovingly crafted piece of comic mayhem that was pure candy to me.

Recently, I picked up for a couple of pounds each, some collections of more recent stories from 2000AD: Devlin Waugh and other more contemporary titles. One of which is Leatherjack, written by John Smith. I’ve not yet finished it, but a third of the way in there are allusions to Burroughs and Borges, and between that and the way it’s written and constructed I’m wondering exactly who this is meant for. Note, I’m not complaining about inappropriateness of any of that — or at least I think…hope…I’m not. But just who does John Smith think that his audience is?

Warren Ellis would say that as soon as you start writing for an audience, you’re doomed as a writer. But I note that he’s remarkably successful at shifting his register so that he delivers mainstream Marvel stories when they’re paying his bills, and has spent a lot of time cultivating a persona that has a very particular catchment: where Neil Gaiman gets play-fey goth girls with a thing for lace, Warren’s stronghold is earnest drinkers with a punky political streak. Neither is an accident.

This stuff matters. Years ago, I had not much clue about what I was writing, let alone who it was for. I submitted Dr Who New Adventures manuscripts that owed as much to my fascination with Thomas Pynchon and Jack Kirby as the Time Lord, and it showed: the Doctor was just another character in a cast of fabulous misfits. No wonder I got rejection letters. And I was only writing this stuff in the first place because, looking back, I didn’t believe myself capable of writing a ‘proper’ book. (No disrespect to the New Adventures novels there, some of which were very good indeed: I wasn’t ready to be writing them or much else at that point.)

I’ve done a lot of growing up since then. And one of the key lessons I’ve learned is that writing is nothing without an audience. In which case, having a good idea of who that reader or viewer is matters in a big way. Please note that this has nothing to do with writing up or down to an audience — that’s approaching this from the wrong direction entirely. An audience of any sort deserves to be treated with respect, and that includes recognition of its intelligence. Making Pynchon references in Who fiction is namedropping as crass as any other kind, however you want to dress it up.

Anyway, I’m getting there. A switched-on and well connected producer I know says that the meetings she has with financiers often revolve around who the audience for a given project is. With that knowledge, budgets of an appropriate size can be developed. Nothing rules out a niche film being made — but make it on a scale that means people don’t lose their houses on the back of it. By the same token, don’t be afraid of thinking big — I’m starting to realise more and more the commercial potential of my screenplay The Devil You Know, and the next draft is all about honing it and removing the self-indulgent elements to be replaced by story beats than an audience can relate to. They deserve that, and I deserve them. Put like that, it’s kind of irresistible.

High-rolling attendees at London Fashion Week are being issued iPads. Which seems an odd decision, since these are people who probably already have one. These iPads are special though. They come pre-loaded with an app that allows you to know what the models you’re watching are wearing as they parade in front of you, and put your order in for the store you’re buying for there and then.

It’s William Gibson come to life. A confirmation that Gibson writes science fiction about the world we live in now rather than a future one. And it has vast implications for the future of entertainment media. As a writer, you should be aware of some of how all this is unfolding, since it applies to you. No use burying your head in the sand, saying you want the BBC to sort out all that stuff for you and leave you to write: this is a hugely exciting time for forward thinking writers, and one that you can either engage with or be steamrollered by as the juggernaut builds up momentum.

The future is happening all around us. You can download a free EP of the Trent Reznor soundtrack to David Fincher’s film The Social Network — a film about Facebook, if you can imagine such a thing — ahead of the release of the film itself. I signed up for a similar taster of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s second collaboration a couple of years back, and as well as being convinced to sign up for a deluxe version of the CD in an artsy package with bonus tracks, have been contacted by Byrne since about his collaboration with Fatboy Slim, a musical based on the life of Imelda Marcos.

All of this is evidence that we are approaching the End Times to a certain stick-in-the-mud way of thinking. Yes, we all know a Jeremy Clarkson analog who listens to Shed Seven while burning rubber on the way to buy an even bigger flatscreen tv that will primarily be used for watching key sports events. But over in Moscow, wild dogs roaming the underground stations have changed their behaviour to switch with the current of the times: pack leaders are now selected for intelligence rather than aggressiveness, all the better to coax food from Russian commuters as they go about their days.

It’s those dogs we should emulate if we want to thrive in the emerging digital media free-for-all. These are amazing times that present unprecedented opportunities for the canny and connected — and if you really are canny, you’ll get connected sooner rather than later. Not everything will work out as planned. I recently priced up how I’d go about getting a new edition of a niche book by a Scandinavian writer created at a smaller cost for buyers while still offering attractive profits to its author. Nothing came of that, but along the way I learned something about the economics of digital printing, and what’s involved in reformatting a book. Somewhere along the line, that knowledge may well be valuable.

If fashionistas can make onscreen orders at a live event, what’s possible for people viewing at home as they engage with their viewing technology? Like to download your favourite drama’s theme tune to your iPhone? Why not? How about the recipe for that centrepiece dish in the foodie film you drooled over the other night? Some of these things are already possible, I’m sure. Recent experiences are opening up the world in a new way for me, thanks to talks with an entrepreneur whose income comes largely from hi-tech attractions in a Singapore theme park that attracts a million visitors a year. It looks likely that we’ll be working together, which is hugely exciting — this is someone who knows how to turn IP into money, and I’ve got no shortage of intellectual property and the ability to create more…

Even in the 21st century, the British countryside is a very white place. So much so, that the appearance of sausages branded as being made by someone called The Black Farmer comes as a bit of a surprise in the local supermarket chilled food section.

The Black Farmer doesn’t appear in Tamara Drewe. But don’t worry, this isn’t a rant about the lack of representation of minorities in rural stories. Good grief, go down that road very long and you’ll end up with something as tokenistic as The Archers can be. Interesting to think about that issue though, and I’m fine with Tamara Drewe’s pale cast since to a large extent the film is a satire on class in an agrarian setting, and in satire part of the gig is to exaggerate what’s there. Which is lots of red-faced white-skinned country dwellers, bound together and separated by the class system.

Arguably there could have been an element to do with swan-eating East European migrants, but that wasn’t a feature of the landscape when Posy Simmonds was drawing the Tamara Drewe cartoon for The Guardian, so there’s no particular reason for such to appear in the Stephen Frears film adaptation of her work. All of which is to say that there’s often something conservative about satire, dedicated as it is to sending up what’s happening, and not presenting any kind of alternative vision of how things could be. The Thick Of It might get people riled at the snakiness of government, but is that really any kind of revelation? And does its apparent insider knowledge give it kudos, or just point to the impotence of writers to change the world?

Except there are writers who do change the world. The homeless charity Shelter was formed in response to the sixties tv play Cathy Come Home. Books including gay sex helped set the scene for changes to the law about homosexuality. Fiction, which includes drama, can hold a mirror to the world that helps people realise that change is necessary.

Holding that mirror in such a way that it brings to light things which many people haven’t seen can be a good thing. Captain Britain started life as an also-ran superhero, albeit one with some interesting creators involved in its development. But bottom line is the good Captain was a knock-off of the more famous Captain America. And then, in his latest incarnation, writer Paul Cornell gave a new take on what Captain Britain is about. He did this simply enough, by populating the comic with a cast more representative of modern Britain than it had been before.

Cornell’s breath of fresh air was a statement of intent, and never more so than his introduction of Faiza Hussain, a young Muslim woman who works as a doctor and acquires powers in the course of the story. Faiza is often the viewpoint character — which considering the readership of Marvel comics is older white men is an interesting and overdue choice. But hey, if Marvel fans can relate to alien overlords and lizard men, they can surely relate to a fresh-voiced Islamic woman — a very contemporary wielder of the sword Excalibur, straight from Arthurian myth.

It’s approaches like Paul Cornell’s that keep genre fiction topical, and stop it getting caught in tropes that are no longer appropriate for the times we live in. We don’t live in a world where Fu Manchu style sinister orientals are credible, or where Jewish characters can be depicted as money-hungry and hook-nosed, because we know those things aren’t true now and only ever caught on because of prejudice and bigotry in the first place. There’ll always be a justified place for comedies like Tamara Drewe. But as a reader, and as a writer, stay open to ways in which you can depict the world we live in with honesty and in the rich complexity that diversity creates.

So, Peggy Mitchell is no more. The Barbara Windsor character has propped up the bar of the Queen Vic, and similarly faced the world as the matriarch of the Mitchell clan. Eastenders thrives on characters like her, who audiences love and hate at the same time at a visceral level. And it’s quite an achievement to come up with them, reliant as they are on actors with the power to bring them to life.

For all that, has there been a more delightfully appalling East End ma than Mrs Cornelius, mother of Jerry in one of Michael Moorock’s sequences of novels? The difference is one that cuts to the heart of soap opera writing. On a show like Eastenders, the writer is assigned a script. Their job is to bring to life the story beats, concocted at meetings with editors and other non-writers, and hopefully make the whole a compelling piece and not a Frankeinsteinian patchwork. It’s a tough job. Not many writers are up to it. My experience of writing for Doctors, which has a small soap element, convinced me that I wasn’t even interested in trying: if I’m going to be sweating over multiple drafts of a script, I want it to be one I care about because it’s my own story I’m telling, not bulletpoints issued to me from who knows where.

You’ll note that this is not a fashionable opinion to express on the blogosphere. Writers are clamouring to pen the adventures of pretty much any character someone else has come up with, but do people really get passionate about writing some of the shows that wash over my screen every week? Judging by the quality of what I see, the answer has to be no. Thing is, there’s a lot of competition to write for continuing dramas, and the chance to write for them is presented annually by the chance to enter the BBC Writers Academy. And I’m unusual in being a refusenik — I have no desire to spend the next few years writing scripts that don’t truly motivate me in the hope that the other side of that I’ll get the chance to pitch my own shows.

I am happy to turn my skills to copywriting in return for money since it’s a clear transaction: I use my skills in creativity and language to devise work that has defined business goals. Usually those gigs are fairly short term, though some are ongoing. And what I’ve learned from copywriting has been invaluable in developing my scriptwriting capabilities. But scriptwriting is an area of my life that I won’t compromise: I did it before, in the process of coming up with treatments for a filmmaker I no longer deal with, in the forlorn hope that something might just happen. Not any more: I had my own little Ground Zero experience, since when I’ve only come up with projects I’m truly passionate about. It’s made all the difference, not just to how I feel but to the increasing level of interest in what I’m doing.

The parallel experience is in writing for comics. I love the medium, but I’m very glad that my early attempts to break in failed. The market is pretty much defined by big ‘events’, where everyone gets turned into a vampire, or the world turns against heroes and they have to win back popular support. Again, these concepts are initiated at an editorial level, and result in countless comics being nigh-impossible to interpret for those who weren’t in on them at the appropriate point. You’ll note the comics I review owe nothing to that approach: they are instead defined by their creators and not a whole chain of editorial staff.

I didn’t leave work that constrained me to get on in life by taking on other misery-making constraints. Call that utopian if you will, but I’d rather succeed in my own way than accept the compromises that would come from writing stories cut from someone else’s cloth.

So, Shane Meadows has a tv series starting this week, a spin-off of his skinhead movie This Is England. It sounds promising enough — four years on from their run-in with ska and an effete kind of racism the crew are coming to terms with Margaret Thatcher and the World Cup. And there is already discussion of a sequel set in another four years when Madchester holds sway, and the gang sport Joe Bloggs trousers and pop Es. All charming enough, and if Meadows’ brand of council estate sentimentalism continues he’ll be doing ads for Werthers one day in which shellsuited pensioners go shoplifting for toffees with their grandchildren. But what of other potential tv spin-offs for movies we’ve seen..?

Harry Brown has definite potential, though whether the tv series could afford Michael Caine is another matter. At any rate, when the New Tricks crew get too old for cases, or when they’ve been pensioned off for corruption committed earlier in their careers, how about they retire with Harry to a picturesque Yorkshire village where they can mete out Biblical justice to rural wrongdoers? This soft torture porn twist on Last of the Summer Wine is a Sunday night winner, combining bucolic landscapes with the kind of brutality that you know that Gene Hunt wasn’t allowed to get away with in Life on Mars.

Even the death of your protagonists is no obstacle to a tv spin-off. Sure, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid were in a bad way at the end of their film. But when a series of crimes are committed that bears their hallmark, old school investigators are sent to investigate and bring them in. CSI: Wells Fargo is the first historical show in the CSI franchise, an opportunity to show how scientific deduction was carried out in the days before DNA testing and UV lights.

There’s room for something horribly heartwarming with an Inception-inspired series. Eschewing the expensive effects stuff and highlighting the family reunion side of the story, expect touching tales of love rekindled as a wheelchair-bound hypnotherapist
enters the dreams of her clients and monkeys around with their psyches so they get all pally with mum and dad again after years of misunderstanding. Of course, the heroine herself has problems with her own folks, and helping others is a way of coming to terms with that. I’m pretty much puking gently into my mouth as I write this, but I can see the concept being a tv winner. Just as long as I don’t have to write the damn thing, which to all intents and purposes is a secular Touched By An Angel.

Much more up my street would be a show inspired by Werner Herzog’s berserk take on Bad Lieutenant. A lot of elements of the movie are readily transferable to the small screen, from alligator-cam viewpoints to iguanas seen only by the protagonist. And in the absence of The Shield’s Vic Mackey from our screens, there’s room for a cop who has scant familiarity with the rulebook and really is a maverick, and not just a regular cop with tousled hair, a liking for Lynyrd Skynyrd, and an informer who lives in a skip.

Hopefully these examples demonstrate that with a bit of thought, quality tv — or at least tv that gets an audience — can be created from the carcasses of films that have had some acquaintance with the box office. Let’s face it, there’s enough crap on the telly already that coming at the problem of entertaining viewers from another angle can only be a good thing. Pop will eat itself, and tv and film are pop as much as music ever has been, and any exec producers reading this know where to find me. I was only joking about my Inception spin-off being mawkish bilge. I really would love to do it. Or at any rate sell the package to someone else.

The Bill went out in style last night, with a story that demonstrated all that was good about ITV’s police drama. Clearly a lot of thought had gone into creating a suitable send-off, and I’m not surprised about that having had a run-in with the series a few years ago when I wrote a sample script under the guidance of one of the show’s regular writers and with input from its editing team, thanks to writers development organisation TAPS. I wasn’t allowed to write about that experience at the time, but with both TAPS and The Bill a thing of the past, I can’t see the problem in doing so now.

I was hugely impressed by the team who put The Bill together. There was a real sense of camaraderie among everyone I came across, from the show’s police advisors to the canteen staff. And the scale of the set-up was staggering: The Bill had a larger hospital set than Casualty, and the attention to detail in the operations rooms, interview suites, and cells was impressive.

The experience of developing a story and script under the guidance of the show’s script editing team was brilliant. No sense of the series being formulaic came across: there was a sincere commitment to helping writers develop original ideas, and the process was one of exploration and evolution rather than shoehorning a concept into a tried and tested format. Which isn’t to say that anything goes: The Bill went through different styles, from 30 minute self-contained stories to one hour episodes with a strong soap element. Though I had a great time writing my sample script, it didn’t have enough of a procedural element to really fit in with the way the show worked. And that helps account for my story not being taken up…but of the fourteen writers I was in a group with, only two had their scripts taken further. So it goes: the experience was still more than worthwhile.

Am I sad that The Bill has gone then? Well, it’s truly a shame that a highly talented and motivated team have lost their jobs. But let’s hope that those same skills and qualities gain those individuals new opportunities in the industry. As for the show itself…like many long running British shows it suffered from a lack of vision. Where American shows like The Sopranos have a sense of the big picture from the off, British ones seemingly stumble along and from time to time hit on a consistent theme or arc that’s reinvented when the next season is commissioned.

That pattern has very much afflicted The Bill, the most recent shake-up its move to a post-watershed slot with the swearier and bloodier possibilities that entails. But after 27 years, was any new format going to radically revitalise a show that’s been consuming law and order based stories in the fictional Sun Hill area of London at a rate of knots for that time?

Regardless, the show went out on a high, with a brave story about how drugs, gun crime, and rape go hand in hand to destroy the lives of young people on an estate, where ‘respect’ is redefined by twisted minds to justify sick behaviours. This contrasts with the very different kind of respect that defines the beliefs and actions of the majority of Sun Hill cops. It was a finely honed story, taut and credible, a small screen look at the issues that Harry Brown explored.

Looking to the future, ITV has announced plans for new dramas, all of which have a crime and justice aspect. The one that excites me most reunites former Coronation Street actress Suranne Jones with writer Sally Wainwright, whose Unforgiven was one of my favourite shows at the start of the year, and which went on to win a RTS award. Sure, it’s about a couple of homicide detectives, which is very familiar territory, but with these two involved I’m confident that Scott and Bailey will be well worth checking out.