“I was very impressed by the high quality of the writing and acting, and extremely depressed when I asked someone, based on the calibre of the readings, how does one make a transition from LCW to BBC to ITV.

The person beside me replied, “Oh, it’s extremely easy.  Just go to Oxford or Cambridge, and when one of your friends gets a job at BBC or ITV, call them up!”

I don’t know how true that is.  I hope it’s comedic overstatement.”

Here is my reply.

As for making the jump from LCW to the BBC.  The person next to you was probably more right than wrong… if you are looking for one easy step.

The chance of you sending a script to the BBC and them making it is tiny if not non-existent.  Think about it as if you were an actor, you would do plays, do commercials, do one lines, student films, short films, go to audition after audition, make contacts within the industry and then when you made it everyone would say “you came from nowhere.” No one, not even writers come from nowhere, they will always have a body of produced work behind them.

As writers we need think more like actors, but as is quite often the case, we writers are perhaps not so pushy, we are use to working alone tapping at our keyboard and not selling ourselves and our scripts. We have dreams of crafting a Lord of the Rings epic before ever producing a short film. We also think that writing is easy, and never learn the craft of good story telling that is led by emotion and not events (it doesn’t help that so much out there is dross anyway).

If you want to write, start off small, with sketches that can be filmed or performed by sketch groups (Messers of Comedy and Stephens and Brooks are two groups that will accept scripts). Move up to one act plays, there are many directors and actors out there desperate to perform since they need the experience too. Once you are getting work seen you can get an agent and then you can get your scripts read by people who matter.  If a script is submitted to a company by an agent it will be read, if not, it will sit on a pile and may get read. An alternate route is to get into Soap, start off as a runner and work your way up through the ranks – it maybe a more reliable root, but perhaps nowhere near as creatively fulling.

I guess the bottom line is you need to write and get things produced rather than letting sit in a draw.  Easy things to get produced are short films and sketches and with modern distribution methods provided by the the net a lot of people get the opportunity to see it.

So here is the deal, the coffers in the kitty are low and I am really looking at 3 months to make this series happen. Don’t worry I am not so deluded that in those three months I think we will finish everything and sign a lucrative deal for 5 series with the BBC.  However, I do think we will finish the scripts, get real readings done, put together a kick ass pitch document and blitz anyone with money, power, vision and talent.

So this means no more slacking, focus all the way.  To help I have brought on a mentor of sorts.  He has one role and that is to demand pages everyday and slap me round the face when they don’t come.

In our small group we have often mentioned this lack of an authority figure as one of the problems we have had in not getting work done at a pace we feel we can realistically achieve. We look at the days where we have been mega productive and ask why can’t we do this everyday? The bottom line is we are our own bosses, and unfortunately we are the bosses you would love to have.

Want to start work late because it was cold outside? Fine.

Need to leave early to get ready for that dinner date at 9? No problem.

Want to sit around and play computer games? Excellent idea, we need to take a break from all this work anyway.

All of that aside, it takes a lot of discipline to do what we have done on spec. We could have rushed this through, but then it would be the same sort of stories and characters we started this to avoid. No one is paying us wages and yet we have found a way to scrape by to fulfil our dreams of being writers.

So roll on the Tennies and may they be far more productive and lucrative than the Noughties.