Writing Television Drama

by Nicholas Gibbs

  Holby City

  Holby City is the medical spin-off series from Casualty. The show hit the screens in 1999 and is set in the same hospital as Casualty but in the different departments of the surgical wards.

  Simon Harper is the show’s script producer whose job includes searching for and developing new writers for the show. His role also includes being the senior script editor on the show and in 2011/12 he began producing episodes.

  NG: How would you describe the show?

  SH: Holby City started as a spin-off to Casualty in 1999. It is a very different show from Casualty. Nominally, it is set in the same hospital but it is set in the surgical wards. Holby was designed as a surgical spin-off and as such is a different show. It is more American-style, almost glossier, slightly heightened. Holby characters are huge characters, quite heightened characters. So there is a different tone and aspiration to Holby. At the moment we define ourselves by what we call the four Hs – Head, Heart, Hooks and Humour. Holby should always feel smart. It should always feel heart. It should be intelligent. It is a show with a very strong female demographic. It should have emotionally driven stories that tug at the heart. It should have pace. A huge sea change, which is fundamental to the brand at the moment, that has been brought on board by Justin Young, our lead writer and series producer, is humour. You need an episode to have that organic character-driven humour to balance the meatier, more emotional strands, to be quite playful, have a twinkle, if you like. I believe that is a vital part of our tone and identity.

  NG: Where do you source your writers from for Holby?

  SH: All kinds of places. One gives out what I call straight commissions. A straight commission can mean that they have an existing body of work; they have got the credits of an hour-long broadcast drama on TV. So that is mostly how I commission. I also run yearly shadow schemes – all the continuing dramas run shadow schemes – I always run mine every autumn for about six writers. The scheme maybe for somebody who is much less experienced. Or maybe somebody is experienced but you’re not entirely sure about them in terms of their fit with this particular show. It is all about fit for the show. You can be a very inexperienced writer and do the most brilliant Holby script ever. You could be the most incredibly experienced writer on any number of other shows but for some reason that marriage of tone, aspiration, characters, the world, the ease of writing about doctors realistically and about people at work, it may not work out. The point of the shadow scheme is people can try out in a safe, trial environment without the pressure of a real commission. The shadow scheme writers come in here for a day, I’ll give them a lecture and immerse them in the world and most vitally the format of Holby, and they are sent off and paid a small sum of money to write a trial script, half a script. They write the A strand of a Holby script. A Holby script is three-pronged if you like, A being 50 per cent of the weight, B being 30 per cent and C being 20 per cent. Then you commission on the basis of what they’ve done. I had six writers on the shadow scheme last year and I commissioned four of them.

  NG: What do you look for in an original script?

  SH: I want to see quite clever and complex storytelling. I don’t think people realize how challenging a Holby is to write. It is not just three strands of soap you’re leaping between. It is 60 minutes, which is not ITV where you are essentially writing 42 minutes with ad breaks; it is not even Casualty, which is 50 minutes. You have got to fill a whole hour. It is like a mini-movie, which is a lot of material. Those three strands, the A, B and C story, are set on three different wards more often than not but they can’t feel divergent. You can’t just flip between them. They’ve not only got to be clever, non-linear stories in themselves which twist and turn and surprise us; they’ve got to intertwine and feel crafted and part of the whole. You’re not just tuning into a soap; you are creating your own crafted one hour of primetime television on BBC1. It has got to be accordingly polished and crafted. I also look for very smart, sexy dialogue, another Holby must, and truthful but fresh-feeling characterization, as well as heart and humour.

  NG: What is the act structure to a Holby City episode?

  SH: In a way we work in very traditional film school acts – five acts, a protagonist, a quest, an obstacle to that quest – a formula that sits very naturally with medical drama. You set up in that Inciting Incident, in the first act, what they need, what they want, their call to arms, and the rest unfolds over a traditional five act structure of dream phase, obstacles, nightmare and resolution.

  NG: How does the scriptwriting process work on Holby City?

  SH: On commission, a writer is given a story document which is in essence the five acts of your A, B and C serial element stories which is presented as a page worth of writing from the Story Department. For example, A story– today is Malick’s story: he really wants to impress Hanssen on this day he has been put in charge of Keller Ward. It kind of says what should happen. More or less. It gives you the story. And ditto for the B story. B story could be Chrissie’s story on AAU and she wants X but ends up learning Y; C story is Frieda perhaps, whose journey is also similarly charted out in essence. This is what happens to her today. It gives you that story in skeleton, which obviously you really pad out and make your own, not least by creating your own original guest stories to weave in to help drive and illuminate and enrich the serial.

  NG: How are the guest stories developed?

  SH: In the week before commission writers work up with the script editors some guest stories. And that gets signed off prior to commission by the series producer and the senior producer, in terms of whether it’s fresh and distinctive enough or whether we’ve had quite a lot of similar type of stories recently, to decide yes or no. Once that has been signed off, then they can begin.

  NG: What’s the time scale from script commission?

  SH: You have your commission conference and then writers go off and do a detailed scene-by-scene. They do up to two scene-by-scenes because it is very important to get that scene-by-scene working. It is a false economy otherwise, given Holby is so complex. You want to get those stories down working in the scene-by-scene, with the aim of getting the writer writing within three weeks from that commission. Then they’ve got two weeks to do their first draft, then I think about ten days to do the second draft and another week for the third.

  NG: Watching Holby I noticed that almost all the action takes place on internal sets?

  SH: We very rarely go outside the world. Very occasionally the story department come up with an idea for a story that goes outside of that world. We then get it in the budget; for example, this season, in an episode which I produced, we went out on location to a bridal shop for one of the scenes because it was important to the character’s story and dilemma. But by and large you don’t. That’s another key difference from the Casualty format.

  NG: How is the serial element developed?

  SH: What happens is we have story conferences. The whole editorial team plus our core writers will go and sit round a table, go off in groups and come up with a serial long-term story for all our characters. We need year-long arcs for all of them. Although a year-long arc is 52 episodes you also have to come up with the shorter arcs for them. Although we block in two episodes for development and production purposes, to storyline overall we chop the year-long 52 episode series schedule into mini-series, 14 episodes in each: 1–14, 15–28, 29–42, etc. So at story conferences you work out their arcs for each mini-series, in themselves self-contained. The story department then goes off with a mass of ideas material and they generate those stories into document form, the serial documents I mentioned before that the writers commission off, and they do it bringing in the core writers to storyline with them.

  NG: How big is that team of core writers?

  SH: There are about 20 writers on the writers’ list of which ten of them you would call core. Writers go off and do other things. Writers can be hard to hang on to. Some come through the BBC’s Writers’ Academy and I give out a lot of
straight commissions. This year there have been at least 14 new writers on the show.

  NG: Some writers have a fear about the medical aspect of the show. What is your advice to them?

  SH: It is a matter of embracing it. We have consultants in all the disciplines and all of them are good at understanding we need the medicine to service the story. Basically, we have our researchers, who are all great and are all story-minded. As a writer, you are allotted your own researcher who does it all for you. You know Ric is general surgical; you know Jack is cardio-thoracic, so you know the medical area that you want for your guest and their meds and surgeries fall into. Now the researcher may get the most abstract of briefs from the writer. You can brief your researcher very vaguely but you must know what you want it to do in story terms. For example, I want my guest to come in thinking it is an elective and standard procedure but I want something uncovered and underlying that’s huge. I want that underlying thing to be something general surgical that brings Ric in. I want Malick to make a mistake. I want it to really go tits up. I want the outcome to be really life-changing for my patient to service this guest story. You can ask the researcher to go out and get something accordingly. From the consultants they get a very detailed medical journey, you know, which they, the researchers, translate into very detailed documents.

  NG: The medicine on the show has to be accurate and make sense. Can that impinge on the storytelling?

  SH: You’ve got to keep in your mind the logic. Sometimes you can read a script and I can tell they’ve been given all the medical information by the way they are playing it out but, for example, you suddenly find yourself asking: Wouldn’t they have told the patient by this stage what the care plan is? Or you’d question why the patient is still on the ward. Sudden holes in the logic can suddenly appear that it’s down to you, the editor and the writer, to think through together. A writer may write that they have a patient who has been in an accident who has been sent up for surgery but suddenly they can’t find her notes. However, logic dictates the missing notes would have been picked up in casualty and so it would not be a bombshell in Holby because they would have been told by Charlie Fairhead and co. in that other part of the hospital! It is all about using your common sense. Have the logic in your head.

  NG: What happens when a writer struggles?

  SH: Sometimes, regrettably – and thankfully it doesn’t happen that often – we do have to rewrite. There’s no getting away from it. It is tough. It is not that they are not good but it is a tall order to write top-notch Holby City under tight deadlines. Or you may as a writer regardless of your proven ability not engage with or have the indefinable chemistry and knack with the particular tone, format and characters of this very particular show. Sometimes we have to rewrite: a job which is always given to one of our core writers.

  NG: Do writers have to be fans of Holby or at least have done their homework?

  SH: They have to love it. That’s the difference in the writing. That’s when the characters just sing off the page. When they just love the world and they love the relationships and they have that fun with it and you feel the joy. That’s the difference.

  Key advice

  When writing a spec script for a continuing drama, make sure you have watched as many previous episodes as possible.

  You don’t have to be a rabid fan, but you should have a feel for the characters and the tone.

  All the major UK continuing dramas are different – try to find out as much as you can about the way they are run and the people who head them up.

  17

  The broadcasters

  In this chapter you will learn:

  • about the main broadcasters in the UK and the range of dramas commissioned or bought by each.

  The broadcasters are the organizations that commission, buy and transmit television programmes. What appears on screen acts as a standard-bearer for that broadcaster and your script must, as a minimum, match the quality that that broadcaster wants to showcase. Broadcasters have different identities, tastes and requirements with regard to television drama.

  Let us look at the major UK broadcasters and how they work.

  The BBC

  The BBC is the biggest producer of drama in the world. Through television, radio and the Internet, the BBC makes approximately 1,000 hours of new, original drama every year and has a back catalogue that is the envy of every other producer/broadcaster in the world. There are a number of channels, each of which has a distinct ‘personality’, both generally and in terms of its drama output.

  BBC1

  Recent or on-going output: Call the Midwife, Casualty, Criminal Justice, Death in Paradise, Doctor Who, EastEnders, Inside Men, Luther, Prisoners’ Wives, Sherlock, Wallander, Waterloo Road

  In terms of BBC1 series, there are effectively three time slots available for drama:

  Weekdays 9 p.m.–10 p.m.

  Saturday evening 7 p.m.–8 p.m.

  Weekend/Weekday 8.30 p.m.–10 p.m.

  Although BBC1 has gained success with pre-watershed dramas like Call the Midwife, Doctor Who and Waterloo Road, there is a drive to uncover the next returnable series and serials in the nine o’clock slot. The BBC is open to all types of genres for its flagship channel because it understands it needs to provide a broad range of different dramas in a primetime slot. In the current economic cycle the BBC will commission more than 20 series at nine o’clock, including recommissioned shows.

  Serials can range from two to six parts, with episodes either 60 or 90 minutes in length. These tend to be stories with a powerful impact like Occupation or Small Island. These shows may even be stripped over a week like Five Daughters.

  Single films are self-contained one-off shows up to 90 minutes in length. They can be family entertainment like The Gruffalo or real-life stories like A Short Stay in Switzerland.

  BBC Daytime is commissioned by controller Liam Keelan. In addition to the continuing drama Doctors, Keelan hopes to commission ‘one big drama per quarter’. Shows have included Land Girls and The Indian Doctor.

  Ben Stephenson, BBC Controller of Drama

  ‘BBC1 drama offers audiences the highest-quality mainstream shows, but it should also take risks with what mainstream drama can be. It should absolutely have the very best in show of all types of drama; singles, serials, series, soap operas, modern and period. Mainstream drama on BBC1 is all about offering audiences drama that moves them in a fundamental way, whether this is through thrills, emotion or humour. BBC1 is ultimately about connecting to people.’

  BBC2

  Recent or on-going output: Desperate Romantics, Eric and Ernie, Exile, The Shadow Line, Night Watch, Page Eight, United, The Hour, White Heat

  BBC2 is the home of bold and strongly authored serials and single films. Individual episodes can be 60 or 90 minutes long and are mainly geared to the nine o’clock slot.

  Ben Stephenson, BBC Controller of Drama

  ‘In 2011 BBC2 had a massive injection of cash, doubling the budget. I wanted to restore the reputation of what BBC2 can do and I was thrilled that we took our average audience from 1.9 to 2.9 million. I think we found a tone and an ambition that really connected to the audience and also to writers, directors and actors. BBC2 drama is all about bringing an alternative point of view to the screen – this may be about the way a story is told, or about the type of story we tell. I found that the minute we said we wanted drama on BBC2 we had things arrive we would never have had otherwise, so it actually encouraged and broadened the range of drama the writers were writing.’

  BBC3

  Recent or on-going output: Being Human, The Fades

  BBC3 is mainly skewed to a young 16–34 audience and so the drama series on this channel need to be authentic and distinctive and laced with humour. The current position is that BBC3 can commission only one or two series a year.

  Ben Stephenson, BBC Controller of Drama

  ‘BBC3 is deliberately there to cater for the audience that the other channels might not cater
for. Due to the licence fee settlement, we will be decreasing the amount of drama on BBC3 to probably one or two dramas a year. Obviously shows such as Being Human, Lip Service and The Fades demonstrate what BBC3 is there to do, which is to bring a broad audience to the subject matter in a way that engages a young audience.’

  Ben Stephenson, BBC Controller of Drama, on…

  All writers are equal

  ‘All good writers are equal. It is not about being a name. Prisoners’ Wives was written by Julie Geary who had never had her own series before and we commissioned Death in Paradise by Robert Thorogood who had never written anything ever. I just read those scripts and I really liked them.’

  It is all about the script

  ‘I suspect some producers may feel that a project will be quicker to screen with a so-called A-list writer, but I just want good scripts. If I am to make a decision between a brilliant script by an unknown Joe Bloggs and a not-so-good one by someone really famous, I’d be mad to go with the not-so-good one. For me, it’s all about making really good TV and a responsibility to work with the best writers in the country whether they are incredibly established or incredibly new, and regardless of fame. So ultimately what will get you a quick commission? A brilliant script.’

  The audience rules

  ‘I’m not particularly concerned about critics. For me it is about audiences. If no one was watching any of our dramas, then that would be a problem. For each show we know we have to deliver in a different way. Occupation, which we did three years ago, just as an example, got three and a half million on BBC1, which was absolutely fine. However, if the second series of a populist drama got 3 million that would be less good.”