Writing for Doctors

On the BBC Writersroom blog, Guild member Joy Wilkinson looks back at her first attempt to write for BBC TV's Doctors.

I wrote what I thought was a pretty good script about an old woman with an obscure eye condition that meant she could see things that weren't there...

One of the things this old woman hallucinated was a cat. Now, if the script was amazing in all other ways, the producers just might have made their lives hell by adding a performing cat into the mix of hectic shooting schedules and strict budgets. But as my script was already fundamentally flawed, the presence of a cat in the cast list probably did not help its chances.

I got a gutting letter. Thanks, but no thanks. Characters too thin. All the best. Bye bye now.

Fortunately for Joy she persevered and is now a regular writer on the show.