Oscar nominees in conversation

In The LA Times, J.A. Fernandez talks to the writers nominated for this year's Original Screenplay Oscar.

There has been talk of a "crisis" in storytelling. Now that the types of stories you've all told in these scripts are being honored, do you feel that there is greater hope?

ARRIAGA: I think that the capacity of fictionalizing life is diminishing. It's less and less and less, because we are losing our inner life. We are losing our capacity of dialogue, of understanding human beings. We are more and more alienated, and the more alienated a society is the more difficult it is to fictionalize something.

DEL TORO: I think that the problem you have with the screenplay is a particular problem of the form. When you toil on a screenplay, you come out with a document that most people refuse to read. It's not an easy form to write or to read. I think there are millions of stories, but the people that can tell them are choosing other forms.

YAMASHITA: I think the problem is also the system, because the studio system encourages the nonoriginal. Everything is an adaptation or something that they're familiar with, and you come up with something that they're unfamiliar with and they don't know what to do with it.

MORGAN: I don't know why we're all so down on ourselves. I don't think it's so bad. I don't think there are many good directors — why don't we talk about that?
[Everyone laughs]

EastEnders to run five nights a week?

The BBC has refused to rule out the possibility that EastEnders could run five episodes a week, reports Leigh Holmwood in Media Guardian.

Rumours of an extra episode have abounded for years and BBC1 controller Peter Fincham is said to be keen.

A weekend report in the Sun said soap chiefs were planning to ramp up production in a bid to take on ITV1's Coronation Street, which also airs five episodes a week.

A BBC spokesman refused to rule out the move, but said nothing was planned presently.

Robert Jones - Party Animals and Rough Diamond

Clemency Burton Hill and Shelley Conn in Party Animals. Photo: Nick Briggs (World Productions/BBC)

On the WGGB website, Robert Jones talks about his two new BBC series: Party Animals (co-created with Ben Richards) and Rough Diamond.

I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to Rough Diamond. It’s a prime-time Sunday night family drama and critics could have picked it apart but, on the whole, they’ve engaged with it on its own terms. The ratings have been pretty good too, in a tough slot. I thought Party Animals would get a better response from the critics. Journalists took a huge interest in it from the start and it’s the only time I’ve been interviewed for the Today programme! In fact, we were interrogated as if we were MPs ourselves. Perhaps that should have given me an inkling about what to expect, because once it aired people either seemed to love it or hate it. Again, though, the ratings have held up okay.

Arts Council policies

Ivan Hewett in The Telegraph attacks Arts Council England's new policy documents.

A new swagger, mingled with staggering hubris, is the hallmark of the ACE's first policy document. This contains a set of six priorities for developing all the different art-forms over the next five to ten years. It wants to widen participation, and involve youth (with much emphasis on young offenders). It wants to boost the creative economy, and build vibrant communities. And it wants to foster internationalism and celebrate diversity.

The ACE isn't quite brazen enough to announce this without at least a show of modesty. Last Monday it launched a three-month survey of the nation's views on public support for the arts. But the fact that the policy document hasn't waited on the results suggests the ACE already knows all the answers.

You can join the debate about the arts and the Arts Council on their website.

Hot Fuzz - Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright

Hot Fuzz, written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, opens today. You can go behind the scenes thank to their video diaries.

Meanwhile, in The Times, Kevin Maher talks to Pegg and co-star Nick Frost. And there's a profile of Simon Pegg by Neil Norman in The Independent

Pegg's secret is that he likes the genres he is parodying, which allows him a little more dramatic licence than someone who holds them in contempt. Thus, Shaun of the Dead was not just a great comedy about suburban slackers; it was also a rather good zombie horror movie or, as the tagline put it, the first romantic zombie comedy or "rom-zom-com". Whether he can pull off the same trick with Hot Fuzz remains to be seen, but so far the entrails are reading well.

Going to America

Many aspiring screenwriters have dreamed of doing it, but Lisa Marks has actually taken the plunge, sold her house and moved to LA. She's blogging about the experience for The Guardian.

I want to crack Hollywood as a scriptwriter - and I have given myself a year to do it. I have sold my flat in North London and left behind the security of my job, family, friends and a life I know inside out to see if I have what it takes to make it in this town.

Even writing it down looks cheesy. I haven't written the film script yet - well, I'm 12 pages in - but the idea's been buzzing around in my head for a year or so.

I'm not a complete novice. Nine years ago I sold my first film script, written with my then writing partner, to Ginger Productions. It was a romantic comedy and we were told by everyone within touching distance of Soho that we were the "next big thing". (As it turned out Guy Ritchie was). We were snapped up by William Morris, landed a couple of development deals and signed with Sky Pictures to write a book adaptation. Everything looked rosy. Then Chris Evans fell out with his producer, who left the company with our film tucked under his arm, the Sky deal went into turnaround and the development deals stalled. We quit William Morris and, totally skint, my writing partner and I went our separate ways.

BBC commissions online drama

In Media Guardian (free registration required), Mark Sweeney reports on the BBC's plans to take drama online.

The BBC has commissioned Endemol to create an ambitious interactive online show that aims to tap the youth audience that is increasingly turning away from TV.

Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, described the show, to be called Signs of Life, as the BBC's "most ambitious internet format to date".

Speaking at the Broadcasting Press Guild lunch he said, "The internet is a new creative medium but original content ideas are still thin on the ground."

He added that the £800,000 budget for the series, which consists of eight 20-minute episodes, is a comparable budget to a typical TV drama.

The Bard on the Beeb

On The Guardian's TV and Radio blog, Guild member John Morrison asks why BBC TV seems to have given up on Shakespeare's plays.

There are many reasons the BBC should be ashamed of its neglect of Shakespeare on television. One of them is the excellent record of BBC radio with Shakespeare. But Jane Tranter, who runs BBC Fiction, believes "you can get your Shakespeare in the theatre. Television has other jobs to do." It may be news to Tranter, but not everybody can pop down to the RSC at Stratford or the National Theatre on the South Bank whenever they feel like it.

Mark Thompson, in a speech in 2005, made the sensible point that TV drama audiences are in many ways more sophisticated than they used to be, and have no problem coping with multilayered stories that challenge the little grey cells. It's time for the BBC to justify its shiny new licence fee by overcoming its fear of Shakespeare and starting to produce his plays.

The Radio Play's The Thing

From the people behind Channel 4's The Play's The Thing, comes a radio drama competition for new writers. The competition is open to: "anybody over the age of 18 on 12 February 2007 who has not had any previous screenplays, stage, radio and television scripts and/or treatments professionally commissioned, published, staged, optioned and/or produced in any format."

As is often the case with this sort of competition run by a broadcaster the terms and conditions mean that entrants give up most of their rights.

Entrants now grant C4 (and third parties authorised by C4) a worldwide and irrevocable licence (which shall be exclusive from the date that the Entrant sends their Submission to C4 until 31st December 2007 and thereafter non-exclusive) (for the full period of any rights in the Submission and Entrant’s Participation) to use, display, publish, transmit, copy, make derivative works from, edit, alter, store, re-format, sell and sub-licence the Submission and/or Entrant’s Participation for such purposes.

Ofcom reviews children's TV

Media watchdog Ofcom has begun a scheduled review of children's TV programming.

Ofcom will begin its review with a research project focusing on:

• the current state of children’s television and other children’s media in the UK;
• the role of public service broadcasting in providing content to children;
• the prospects for the future delivery of a wide range of high quality and original content for children and the factors which are likely to influence this;
  
• and relevant international perspectives or examples.
  

Ofcom intends to publish the findings of its research in summer 2007.

Lending authority

The most-borrowed books from libraries, argues Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian, have qualities that are too often ignored.

Catherine Cookson, Josephine Cox and Maeve Binchy all write with the kind of craftsmanship often missing from more lofty literary titles. The worlds their books inhabit - the north country in the case of Cookson and Cox, and Ireland for Binchy - are intimately known and deeply understood. Their narrators display not a jot of fashionable unreliability (they are usually working girls with no time or space in their lives for whimsy). If, in the end, things generally work out for the best - that is, with a marriage - there is no hiding the fact that there has been loss and suffering along the way. The realism here is strictly of the non-magical kind. Dogs do not suddenly sprout wings, a recipe for stew remains a recipe for stew rather than an enchanted potion, and no one turns out to be an hermaphrodite. It is life, and it is exactly as we know it. Which is why library users - perhaps the purest kind of readers - simply can't get enough of it.

Paul Abbott's Desert Island Discs

If you missed Paul Abbott's Desert Island discs on Sunday, you can
catch them again on Friday at 9am on Radio 4.

Unfortunately the online Listen Again facility is not available for this show.

Other writers who've been castaways in recent years include Jacqueline Wilson, Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby, David Edgar , Arnold Wesker (who, like Paul Abbott asked for his luxury to be pen and paper), Alexander McCall Smith and Jack Rosenthal.

Radio drama from Wales

With five plays from BBC Wales due to air on BBC network radio over the next two months, the BBC is celebrating the strength of a drama department that has also produced Doctor Who and Torchwood for network TV.

"It is not just the volume of BBC Wales's radio drama output over the past 12 months that has been so impressive, but also the variety," said Clare Hudson, Head of English Language Programmes, BBC Wales.

"The writers featured have come from Wrexham to Rhayader and from west Swansea to Western Australia... Some of the writers have been writing for decades; some are comparatively new writers whose talents have been developed through the BBC's partnership with Ty Newydd, the National Writers' Centre for Wales."

WGA award winners

The award season rumbles on, with the winners announced yesterday of the Writers Guild of America Awards 2007.

Among the winners were The Sopranos (Best Dramatic Series), written Mitchell Burgess, David Chase, Diane Frolov, Robin Green, Andrew Schneider, Matthew Weiner, Terence Winter.


Best Comedy Series went to the American version of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's The Office, written by Steve Carell, Jennifer Celotta, Greg Daniels, Lee Eisenberg, Brent Forrester, Ricky Gervais, Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, Stephen Merchant, B.J. Novak, Michael Schur, Gene Stupnitsky.

Love lives of women writers

Why have so many great female novelists had such disastrous love lives, wonders Frances Wilson in The Independent.

How can we account for the high level of emotional casualties among those who have given us our most enduring love stories? It is well documented that the pressure of the job makes writers, male and female, famously hard to live with, but the cost for the woman writer has always been greater than it is for her male equivalent; not only is success harder to come by, but she suffers many more blows to the heart along the way. Do women writers have higher expectations than the rest of us when it comes to their own relationships, or is it that a commitment to writing leaves no room for anyone else?

Edinburgh Fringe Roadshows

If you're thinking of taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, you might want to visit one of the Roadshow events taking place around the country over the next few weeks.

BAFTA Film Awards

Among the BAFTA film award winners last night were Michael Arndt for Little Miss Sunshine (Original Screenplay) and Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock for The Last King Of Scotland(Adapted Screenplay, from the book by Giles Foden).

American negotiations

The Writers Guild of America west and East are gearing up for the latest negotiations to renew their Minimum Basic Agreement. As explained by writers and bloggers, Craig Mazin and Ken Levine, the issues at stake - notably royalties and residuals in the digital age - are similar to those being addressed by the WGGB.

Who really made Babel?

Rinko Kikuchi in Babel, written by Guillermo Arriaga, directed by Alejandro González Inárritu.

In The Guardian, Jo Tuckman looks at the dispute between director Alejandro González Inárritu and scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga. After collaborating on Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and now Babel, the two men are barely on speaking terms following a dispute over the origination of their films.

"It is not true to say that this is Alejandro González Inárritu's trilogy," Arriaga says. He insists they all stemmed from ideas he [Arriaga] had "a long time before we even met"...

Arriaga says he believes that audiences would do well to pick their films from the writing credit. He points to Paris, Texas as more the work of Sam Shepard than Wim Wenders, and applauds Charlie Kaufman's progress into the spotlight.

Jacqueline Wilson report

Photo of Jacqueline Wilson by Anne Hogben/WGGB.

What an impressive person Jacqueline Wilson is. I suppose that's no surprise, given her achievements, but everyone at her talk at the Writers' Guild Centre earlier this week seemed to share the sense that she really is something special. She was delightfully informal and keen to help fellow writers with frank advice and lots of encouragement.

Highlights of the evening included the revelation that her first paid writing job had been for a story for the very first Jackie magazine ("No payment has ever meant as much to me as that £3!") and the story of J.K Rowling having to hitch a microphone pack to her knicker elastic before giving a reading at Buckingham Palace.

Jacqueline also spoke about how different the publishing world has become. When she started, she told us, publishers seemed quite happy to let new authors develop over three or four books without making their advances back. But now, new writers are expected to make money from the very start or else face getting dropped.

Jacqueline's latest book, Jacky Daydream, will be published in March.

Update: Guild member Frances Lynn has written an account of the event for her blog.

The next event at the Writers' Guild Centre will be an interview with playwright David Edgar on 22 February.

Horror books on the rise

Horror is set to be the hottest literary genre of 2007, argues Danuta Kean in The Independent.

According to Nielsen BookScan, which compiles the nation's book charts, sales of titles classified as horror and ghost stories almost doubled to just over £7m by value in 2006 from £3.8m in 2005. The number of copies sold increased from 566,000 in 2005 to almost one million (892,000) over the same period. Though old-school writers including Herbert, Dean Koontz and Shaun Hutson continue to dominate, new names are emerging, though not all are classified as horror.

Mark Shand wins the Bradley Bursary

Mark Shand has won the eighth biennial Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for new radio writers with his play Abigail Adams, reports the BBC Press Office.

Jeremy Howe, judge and Commissioning Editor, said: "Drama on Radio 4 has launched the careers of hundreds of writers - it is a part of what we do and we are very proud of our track record: in the last year we have commissioned over 20 first time writers for the Afternoon Play alone.

"We are delighted to be premiering Mark Shand's delightful, witty, life affirming play Abigail Adams on the network. He is a writer to watch, I'm sure the kind of writer Alfred Bradley himself would have championed."

Cooke at the Court

On The Guardian Theatre Blog, Michael Billington analyses the comments of Dominic Cooke, the Royal Court's new artistic director, about his plans for the theatre.

What do we want to see when we go to the theatre? A reflection of our own world or someone else's? I suspect the honest answer is a mixture of both. We like recognition. We also like social exploration. But when Dominic Cooke this week held a press conference to announce his first season as the Royal Court's artistic director, he astonished everyone by talking about putting on stage "a world of privilege and power" and dealing with our "unconsciously aspirational values."

Stef Penney wins Costa Book of the Year

London author Stef Penney has won the Costa Book of the Year award for her debut novel, the Tenderness of Wolves, reports BBC News.

The book is set in Canada - a country the author has never visited because she had agoraphobia.

The award - formerly the Whitbread Prize - pits five winners of separate categories against each other for the Book of the Year.

Penney, aged 37 and a screenwriter, won the "first book" award before scooping the top £25,000 prize.

US Network pilot orders 2007-08

American networks are moving away from long-running serialised dramas in their orders for pilot shows for 2007-08, reports Nellie Andreeva in The Hollywood Reporter.

Dubbed as "the season of serialized dramas," 2006-07 yielded only one big hit in the genre, NBC's "Heroes," and one modest success, CBS' "Jericho." With a number of high-profile, heavily serialized new shows such as ABC's "The Nine" and "Six Degrees," NBC's "Kidnapped" and Fox's "Vanished" long gone, the networks opted for more close-ended dramas for next fall.

A record four British drama concepts have landed pilot orders: "Life on Mars" and "Football Wives" (the latter based on "Footballers' Wives") at ABC, "Viva Laughlin!" (based on "Viva Blackpool!") at CBS and a project based on "Wild at Heart" at the CW. They have attracted impressive auspices, with David E. Kelley writing and executive producing "Mars," Bryan Singer directing and executive producing "Wives" and Hugh Jackman executive producing and guest starring in and Gabriele Muccino directing and executive producing "Laughlin!"

Adrian Hodges - Primeval

As he looks forward to the premiere of his new ITV series, Primeval (trailer above), on Saturday night, Adrian Hodges talks on the WGGB website about the challenges of writing prime-time drama.

It’s great that ITV are getting back into prime-time fantasy drama and I think there’s a feeling that they’re really committed to creating a new raft of fresh, lively and innovative shows. Writing for prime-time Saturday night ITV is probably one of the biggest challenges a TV writer can face but the network has given Primeval fantastic promotional support and, obviously, I really hope that we get the viewing figures to justify their confidence in the show. I’m really proud of it, so fingers crossed.

BBC Programme Catalogue

Guest post from Gail Renard, Chair of the Guild's TV Committee:

If you don't have a deadline (otherwise you'll never be able to drag yourself away) have a look at the new BBC Programme Catalogue.

It's an experimental prototype which has not yet been publicised and, in the words of Michael Caine, not a lotta people know that. For statistical anoraks, the catalogue carries details of 981,322 BBC radio & TV programmes, dating back 75 years. It also covers 503,193 subject categories from 1,238,322 contributors (count 'em all.)

The programmes themselves are not available but, as Torchwood tells us, everything changes in the 21st century. You've got to be prepared. The BBC also state that this is a vast catalogue, but it's not comprehensive. There's no guarantee of accuracy and there are some mistakes.

The biggest one of all is, despite the fact it gives all of the info under the sun, writers as a rule are not listed. Why not drop the BBC an e-mail and let them know just how we feel about that?

Update (07/02/07): ITV Catalogue

Just in case we didn't flitter away enough writing time surfing the BBC Catalogue yesterday, here's another tip top work displacement activity. Alert reader and writer Rory Clark has informed me of the equivalent ITV website :

Alas there are no Thames shows listed, as those are owned by Fremantle, so you might actually get some work done today.

Joe Carnahan - Smokin' Aces

On Creative Screenwriting, Ben Rock talks to Joe Carnahan about his new film, Smokin' Aces (above).

How did you go about fine-tuning the dialogue in Smokin' Aces so everyone sounded different?
That was a conscious effort. Like anything else, you have to stay on it, give it real veracity and truth. With Smokin' Aces, I wanted to be able to write, [for instance] two young African-American women from Oakland. Is that possible? Do I know enough culturally or can I educate myself to the point where I feel comfortable doing that? The FBI stuff—that's a different kind of a lingo.

There are all these different kind of freaky people that populate this world, I wanted them to have signature styles of speech and their own kind of slang and their own way of relating to one another. I'd write stuff and I'd say, "That's a great line, but that does not fit with this character so it's gotta go." I'm sure all of us have these gigantic files that have snippets of other scenes that didn't work that we lockbox away in the hopes that someday we'll say, "Oh my God! I've got a great line for this!"

Trevor Lloyd - Desperados

David Proud (left) and Reece Pantry in Desperados, created by Paul Smith.

On BBC Writersroom, Trevor Lloyd talks about writing for the new CBBC series, Desperados.

How aware were you of new territory being covered?

Very much; mostly from the theatre experience that I've had I knew this was new territory. It's about being aware of it but not letting it limit you in any way. That's what's really exciting about this project; it's about people's perceptions of disability and wheelchair users. In the episode I write, the team are trying to fundraise so there's a lot of stuff about how people perceive you as a disabled person and the resistance of some of the characters to reinforce that 'pitiful' stereotype by going out with a collecting tin. Of course that's not the case at all, they're being incredibly proactive, but how they deal with that misconception and come to terms with it is incredibly interesting. And in a broader way it's what the series is all about.

I've been out on tour before and if two or more people in a wheelchair are gathered together people do assume you're on some kind of outing, and will talk to the able bodied person - or sometimes the wheelchair. It's awkward but a lot of that is lack of exposure, people are unaware of how to react. And that exposure is a really important part of what this series is going to do, in a really sparky, pacy and entertaining way.

Desperados is on BBC One on Wednesdays at 5.30pm.

Norman Mailer

In The Observer there's an enjoyable piece by Robert McCrumb on Norman Mailer, for whom self-doubt has never been much of a problem.

If he wasn't such an enthralling conversationalist, you'd call the man a world champion narcissist. But he'll always beat you to that punch. As he wrote in his Esquire interview with Madonna in 1994: 'There is nothing comparable to living with a phenomenon when the phenomenon is you and you observe yourself with a cool intelligence, your own, and yet are trapped in the cruellest pit of the narcissist - you not only are more interested in yourself than anyone else alive, but suffer from the likely suspicion that this might be justified. You could be more interesting than anyone you've encountered.'

V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize

The V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize for unpublished short stories is open for entries. Run by the Roayal Society for Literature, the first prize is £1,000. There is an entry fee of £5 and the closing date is 28 February 2007.

Arts Council funding

On The Guardian's Theatre Blog, Lyn Gardner questions the Arts Council's funding policy.

The announcement by the Arts Council of a new £1.5m three-year Young People's Participatory project which aims to provide support and training for those working in youth theatre is undoubtedly welcome, particularly in an area which is very much a Cinderella in the arts. But it is also a sign of an increasing trend to fund participatory projects and education work rather than art itself.

Even the Grants for the Arts section on the Arts Council's own website talks not of funding artists but of providing funding for those "who use arts in their work". Theatre companies frequently tell me that while they can access money for education and access projects or go on courses to learn how to be better bureaucrats, it is increasingly difficult to get money to make theatre. In recent years the Arts Council has taken to funding too many umbrella organisations, and not enough artists.

How can you tell if an actor's funny?

On his blog, comedy writer Ken Levine ponders the question of casting for laughs.

At the end of the day, I’ve always gone by the Nat Hiken test. Hiken, a brilliant comedy writer, created and wrote THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW and CAR 54 WHERE ARE YOU? He used to say that if an actor auditioned and he wanted to go right home and write twenty minutes of dialogue for him, THAT’S the actor you hire.

Jacqueline Wilson at the Writers' Guild Centre - reminder

Tickets are still available to see Jacqueline Wilson at the Writers' Guild Centre in London next Tuesday, 6 February 2007, 6.30 - 8pm

It will be a fantastic opportunity to meet the Children’s Laureate and hear about her experiences working as a children’s writer.

Free refreshments will be provided before and after the event along with the opportunity to mingle with fellow guests.

Tickets for this event are £10 for Writers' Guild members £20 for non-members.

To book, contact Moe Owoborode at the Guild office.

British Library under threat

In The Telegraph, Sam Leith states the case for the defence of the British Library.

Nobody who uses the British Library in St Pancras can have read this weekend's reports on the subject without horror.

Facing the prospect of a seven per cent cut in its £100 million annual budget, the library has announced (not without a certain amount of calculation) that it might have to start charging readers for entry, reduce its opening hours, and/or – most horrifying of all – cut its collection of books and manuscripts by 15 per cent.

The British Library is an absolute paradise on earth. It is warm, clean, comfortable, accommodating and quiet. Its on-site catering, like its wireless internet access, might be extortionately priced and only intermittently satisfactory. But what it is supposed to do, it does – and does so brilliantly it could make you weep.

Patrick Marber interview

Screenwriter and playwright Patrick Marber, who was recently nominated for a best adapted screenplay Oscar for Notes On A Scandal (from the novel by Zoe Heller, trailer below), talks to BBC News.

"[The studios] have suddenly realised that these films, arthouse films, make money for them and they take them very seriously," he says.

"Every studio has its own independent division, so people like me who would have once been abused as artsy-fartsy idiots are quite respected.

"They recognise that good scripts attract the talent. And there's a whole generation of stars who genuinely want to be in good projects."

Bruno Heller

Dylan Callaghan talks to Bruno Helller for the Writers Guild of America, west.

Bruno Heller, co-creator of HBO's award-winning historically dramatic series Rome and son of acclaimed Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? screenwriter Lukas Heller, readily admits that his father's successful career likely kept him from the scribe trade for years. “I'm sure there were some good oedipal reasons why I didn't put pen to paper until a couple years after his death.” Heller instead spent years working nearly every other below-the-line job in film, from location manager to clapper loader. “When I'd failed at everything else, I finally had a crack at this.”

BBC launches e-commissioning

From the BBC Press Office:

From March 2007 independent and in-house programme makers submitting programme proposals to BBC Vision will find the system quicker and less bureaucratic.

The BBC is to update its commissioning process through the introduction of a web-based system for managing programme proposals.

The new site will enable the BBC Vision to handle the huge volume of proposals it receives faster and more effectively.

Having submitted their proposals electronically programme makers will be able to track the progress of their ideas online.

The Cowards on BBC Three

Sketch comedy group The Cowards - Tim Key, Tom Basden, Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Golaszewski - are taking over the BBC Three website for the next six weeks.

Staffroom monologues

If you work or volunteer in a school, you're eligible to enter the Staffroom Monologues competition being run by Teachers' TV. The deadline for entries is Monday, 26 February 2007.

Writersroom success

In 2005, Stephen Riley sent his radio script, The Birth and Death of Daylight, to BBC writersroom. A script reader recommended the piece highly and in 2006 it was eventually chosen for The Wire on Radio 3.

Stephen takes up the story himself on the BBC Writersroom website.

To be honest, I originally wrote this piece for radio because I knew radio was a medium that's open to new writing. But I found the whole process to be genuinely collaborative, focused on the story, and extremely supportive throughout.

There were compromises and things I could have done a lot better, but the story is out there, and it was a lot of fun doing it. Now I've just got to try and do it again...

Jim Harrison interview

In The New York Times, Charles McGrath talks to novelist and screenwriter Jim Harrison.

Jim Harrison, author of rugged, outdoorsy books like “True North” and “Legends of the Fall,” is tough on vehicles. His current ride is a much-abused Chevy Tahoe that every day is pounded over terrain most S.U.V.’s experience only in commercials: splashing through creeks, lurching down hills, bouncing over rock-strewn dirt roads in the back country of southern Arizona, where Mr. Harrison and his wife, Linda, spend the winter months in an adobe casita on the Sonoita Creek. The shock absorbers are so overstressed they’ve gone a little spongy.

Mr. Harrison, who is 69 with a lot of miles on his tires, is not much kinder to his own chassis. He is half-blind in his left eye, which gives him a wild, cockeyed look, and a pack or two of American Spirits every day have left him with a voice like gravel. Mr. Harrison was once a legendary eater and drinker, the sort of iron-livered, barrel-chested trencherman who could hold his own at the table with Orson Welles and John Huston and who thought nothing of a 10- or 12-course lunch at Ma Maison followed by Champagne and a gross of oysters for supper. But that was back in his days as a part-time Hollywood screenwriter, when Mr. Harrison also befriended Jack Nicholson (whose watercolor of Mr. Harrison and four nude dancers at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris hangs on a wall of the casita) and both made and quickly blew through a good deal of money, much of it spent on meals.

Online video theatre promos

On The Guardian Theatre Blog, Karen Fricker looks at how theatres are promoting themselves using online video. Examples include TAG Theatre's interview with Ewan McGregor.

Parsons and Naylor's Pull-Out Sections

Andy Parson and Henry Naylor begin recording their ninth series of Parsons and Naylor's Pull-Out Sections on 9th February. They're looking for topical gags to go into the "stand-up sections" that link the sketches, to be delivered by Andy and Henry. The show is made for Radio 2 and so subject matter needs to be relevant to the Radio 2 Audience.

Full details are on the BBC Writersroom.

Rocliffe New Writing Forum 21 February

Hosted by BAFTA at 195 Piccadilly in London, the next Rocliffe New Writing Forum will be held on 21 February 2007. The deadline for script submissions is 30 January.

The forum works as a development workshop, enabling writers to test extracts of new material with professional actors and receive feedback from an established industry guest.

Five Days - Gwyneth Hughes

If you've enjoyed the first two episodes of Five Days this week, a reminder that there's an interview with Gwyneth Hughes, who created and wrote the serial, on the Guild website.

Can short plays survive?

Unless they're by Pinter or Beckett, playlets rarely get a look-in on our main stages. It doesn't have to be this way. Festivals and double bills are simple solutions to the argument that short plays aren't commercially viable or value for money unless they star Michael Gambon or Harold Pinter, yet such events are relatively uncommon.

The truly short play is in danger of becoming a neglected form. Still seen as inferior and limiting, it's not afforded the kudos of, say, the short story. I'm not arguing against large-scale work or the admirable monsterist movement, just against losing the art of brevity, of finding the epic in the miniature and of making every word count.

More from Maxie Szalwinska on The Guardian Theatre blog.

Life On Mars trailer

Trailer for series two of Life On Mars (created by Mathew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah).

2007 Oscar nominations

The writing categories often get overlooked in the Oscar coverage, so in case you don't see them elsewhere, the nominees for Best Original Screenplay are:

• Guillermo Arriaga - Babel
• Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis - Letters From Iwo Jima
• Michael Arndt - Little Miss Sunshine
• Guillermo del Toro - Pan's Labyrinth
• Peter Morgan - The Queen

The nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay are:

• Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer and Todd Phillips - Borat Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan
• Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby - Children Of Men (based on the novel by P.D. James)
• William Monahan - The Departed (based on a screenplay by Siu Fai Mak and Felix Chong)
• Todd Field and Tom Perrotta - Little Children (based on the novel by Tom Perrotta)
• Patrick Marber - Notes On A Scandal (based on the book by Zoe Heller)

The Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, February 25. Who will you be rooting for?

Joel Surnow - 24

Joel Surnow, co-creator of hit TV series 24 (starring Kiefer Sutherland, pictured, right), talks to John Patterson in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Right now, Surnow, his co-creator Robert Cochran and the writing team are writing episode 19 - with no idea as yet how the show will wrap up this season. They work a merciless schedule, necessitated by 24's pioneering non-stop format (other shows have two-month-long hiatuses per season, 24 runs for 24 consecutive weeks). After writing the four-episode block already aired, they had no idea what would be happening by episode six. If the writers aren't perpetually surprising themselves, says Surnow, how can they expect to keep surprising the fans?

"I don't know how we'll get Jack back in a good place so we can pull the rug out from under him all over again - but we'll try! It's brutal, it's rough. 18 scripts from July to January, six from January to June. So it starts to feel about now that we have the ending in sight - even though, of course, we don't know the ending."

Save the Theatre Museum

The Writers' Guild has signed up in support of the campaign to save the Theatre Museum.

On January 7 the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden in the heart of London’s Theatreland closed its doors to the public. It will, however, continue its valuable work in education and outreach until at least August 2007.

This is as a result of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s breaking its commitment under the Heritage Act 1983 to set up and maintain a separate Theatre Museum. The Guardians want to make the V&A keep its word and re-open the Russell Street site to the public. Otherwise we face the prospect of having no equivalent Theatre Museum at all for at least two to three years, and probably a lot longer. It seems completely unacceptable that we should have the Museum building and all its exhibits available, to say nothing of its potential for stimulating further activity, and not keep it open until a replacement is provided.

The vast majority of the UK’s major theatre organisations are backing our campaign. Will you join us?

Find out more about the background to the campaign, write to your MP and sign up as a 'Guardian' of the Museum.

Bryan Elsley - Skins

In The Telegraph, screenwriter Bryan Elsley tells Stephen Pile how showing a draft script to his son, Jamie, led to the creation of teen drama Skins (pictured, above).

Jamie was not impressed. "It's all turgid, middle-aged bollocks, dad," he said, and suggested writing about teenagers instead. "But don't do it in the usual way. Let me help you do it properly."

...In no time Elsley had set up a talented young writers' group with 16 members, all in their teens and early twenties. "The rule is that everyone gets paid for their ideas and writing in the group, but all the material discussed or written at the meeting can be used by the designated writer of the episode."

In this series, five episodes were written by Elsley and four by the twentysomething writers, including his son. "We have a mentoring system where the more experienced writers, the 23-year-olds, help the 17- and 18-year-olds. The 17-year-olds have written six-minute spin-off films for the website, but if we get a second series we want them to write their own episodes supported by the group."

Skins starts on E4 on Thursday.

Screenwriters' Festival 2007

It's been confirmed that the Screenwriters' Festival 2007 will take place from Tuesday 3rd to Friday 6th July 2007 at The Manor by the Lake (at Cheltenham Film Studios).

Confirmed speakers for this, the second Festival, include Jimmy McGovern, Guillermo Del Toro and Julian Fellowes.

The Pitch Factor competition will be running again and, for the first time, there will also be a spec script market.

Guild office email

Following recent technical problems, the Guild's offiice email will be restored by the end of Friday 19th Jan.

Please resend any messages sent earlier in the week.

BBC licence fee settlement

As has been widely reported, the government has announced the level of licence fee funding for the BBC until 2012.

The level will increase, but not by as much as the BBC wants. The Guild has been a strong supporter of the continuation of the licence fee.

BAC funding threat

Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), home to some of the UK's most innovative theatre practice and new writing in recent years, is threatened with closure reports Lyn Gardner on The Guardian Theatre Blog.

Last week BAC's local council, Tory-governed Wandsworth, gave notice that from April 1 it intends to cut BAC's annual grant from £100,000 to zero and simultaneously start charging a commercial rent for the Lavender Hill building of more than £270,000 per annum. If this was to go ahead, BAC could not survive and would have to close.

This would be a tragedy for the people of Wandsworth, whose cultural lives would be so much poorer. It would also be a tragedy for British theatre because it would inflict huge damage on the theatre ecology. The local children and companies watching and working in Wandsworth today should be working at the National and on international stages tomorrow. Without BAC that won't happen.

When will government, both local and national, wake up to the fact that giving money to the arts is not subsidy, but investment - investment which not only has a financial return, but which also brings much wider benefits and improvements to people's lives? The health of the country demands that we invest in the imagination as well as in hospitals.

Update: more bad news on theatre funding.

On January 31 this year Chester Gateway closed its doors after 38 years as a professional producing theatre. At the end of this week (January 20), Leicester's Haymarket Theatre will follow.

The closures will leave Leicester without a professional theatre until 2008, and there is no alternative venue envisaged for Chester until 2010 at the earliest.

Bigot Brother

In a guest post for this blog, Gail Renard, Chair of the Guild's TV Committee, argues that Celebrity Big Brother has proved to be a reality show too far.

Okay so if the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross on your lawn and lynch your mother and you don’t actually use the phrase, “Stop that you racist!”; it ceases to be a racist act?

Well, that’s been Channel 4’s inestimable defence in the whole Big Brother debacle. I think they’re confusing it with another well-known series’ catchphrase, “I’m A Crucified Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.” Thank goodness the respected Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty (pictured, above) finally used the “r” word because it seems that’s what it takes for a TV company to do their moral and legal duty.

As writers have been discussing in pubs for ages, reality shows have already done great damage to television. They are largely cheap-to-produce TV fodder, which don’t use commissioned scripts or writers. These series devour what little writing work is available and devalue our industry.

On the plus side, TV companies have recently sussed that these reality shows bring in no repeats or overseas sales. A television company’s library is one of their greatest assets. I look forward to the companies explaining that to their shareholders and board.

It was inevitable that to maintain and gain ratings that reality shows would have to become more bear baiting and extreme. It’s only because the Christians and the Lions weren’t available (panto season you know) that we ended up with Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty. It’s already become an international incident.

Channel 4, Endemol, Ofcom and the powers-that-be have shamefully let the kicking continue which, to me, makes them as morally culpable as any bullies or racists. How long before the first sniper, on a grassy knoll in Elstree, waits for a celeb to be evicted by Davina and we have our first Celebrity Shooting?

Now there’s an idea for a new series. I’ll get onto my agent at once.

Iris Yamashita - Letters From Iwo Jima

Ken Watanabe in Letters From Iwo Jima, screenplay by Iris Yamashita, directed by Clint Eastwood (Photo: © Warner Bros. Pictures 2006).

When Clint Eastwood was researching his film about Iwo Jima, Flags Of Our Fathers, he came across letters from the Japanese commander during the American assault on the island and wanted to use them as the basis for a companion film, explains Jay A. Fernandez in the LA Times.

Eastwood brought the project to his best picture-winning "Million Dollar Baby" screenwriter, Paul Haggis, who was too buried in post-production on "Crash" to write it but who took it upon himself to find another screenwriter. Yamashita's agent at Creative Artists Agency got wind of the open assignment and sent Haggis (also a CAA client) some of her scripts.

"They were very different, very well researched and had a distinct sense of time and place," Haggis says via e-mail from New Mexico, where he's shooting his follow up to "Crash," "In the Valley of Elah," a drama about the suspicious disappearance of an Iraq war soldier.

At the time, Yamashita, who declines to reveal her age, was working full time as a Web programmer and had yet to sell a spec or get a paid assignment. But during their second meeting, Haggis suddenly decided that she was right for the gig and told Yamashita, "OK, now you can quit your job."

When a sitcom sings

It's probably best to avoid in spec scripts, but 'the musical episode' has a long history in American sitcoms. As Edward Wyatt reports in the New York Times, it can be the sign of creativity flagging but for hospital sitcom Scrubs, it seems to have energised the show.

“Most comedy writers are tall, jocky types,” said Bill Lawrence, the creator of “Scrubs.” “But they don’t like being stuck in the comedy closet. Secretly they have arguments about Sondheim.”

Elsewhere in the New York Times, the episode is reviewed by Ginia Bellafante.

The episode revolves around the arrival of a female patient at Sacred Heart who imagines that everyone around her is not speaking but singing. For the entire show, all heard through her ears, the hospital staff converses in show tunes created by the songwriters of “Avenue Q,” Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx. (The gambit produces moments like this: “Hello I’m Dr. Kelso!/I’m delighted that you came!/The doctors said you fainted and you don’t know who to blame!” Or: “We’re running a test that’s a waste of our time!/But at least she’ll accept that she’s medically fine!”)

Donald Faison (left) and Zach Braff in Scrubs, created by Bill Lawrence.

Joost: the future of TV?

In Wired magazine, Spencer Reiss discovers how Joost, a company from the men behind Kazaa and Skype, could be the future of TV.

The vision: universal TV, running on a hybrid P2P platform - millions of exquisitely networked PCs fortified with traditional video servers. Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone's a winner!

Illustration for Wired by Paul Willoughby

Has fiction lost its power?

In The Times, Rod Liddle explains why he no longer reads novels.

[Fiction] has become so broad, so general, so eager to please, so self-satisfied, so anxious to make itself relevant and attuned to the times, so shamelessly — and again, forgive me, I can think of no better phrase — middlebrow. In other words, exactly like journalism, except with some made-up names. And we have journalists for journalism, don’t we? Literary fiction, it seemed to me, had stopped doing what literary fiction does best: getting beneath the skin of a subject, to the viscera, without even always intending to so do. It had started being like every other form of mass entertainment, aiming wide and broad, hoping to alienate nobody.

Michelle Buck to leave ITV

ITV Productions drama controller Michele Buck is to leave the company, prompting a restructure of its London drama operations.

Ms Buck is expected to join her former ITV colleague Damien Timmer's new independent production company, Mammoth Screen.

Following her departure, the ITV Productions director, John Whiston, has decided to merge the London drama department with the comedy and drama unit run by Andy Harries.

Mr Whiston will be hiring a new ITV Productions London drama controller to run the merged departments.

Mr Harries will not be renewing his ITV contract when it ends in December and is not expected to continue as head of an in-house production department.

More from Leigh Holmwood in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Guild office email problems

Due to technical problems the Guild's email will be down for the next few days. If you need to contact the office please be patient, since the phone lines are likely to be very busy.

Greg Garcia interview

In Script Magazine (pdf file), Debra L. Eckerling talks to My Name Is Earl creator, Greg Garcia.

Garcia was on vacation with his wife’s family in North Carolina when he came up with the idea for My Name is Earl.

“I didn’t really start with anything in particular, other than the fact that I believe in karma, I like stories about people starting fresh later in life, and I’ve always been attracted to the world of trailer parks. So, I guess I took those three things and came up with this idea.”

Garcia pitched the idea to Fox, and they turned it down. He took two weeks to write the pilot anyway. Fox and the rest of the networks turned Earl down, so it sat on a shelf for a year and a half.

“Then I was having lunch with NBC, and they mentioned they had read Earl and wanted to do a show with me,” Garcia explains. “I was like, ‘Let’s just do that show.’ They thought about it and said, ‘Yeah. Why not? Let’s give it a shot.’”

Find out more about Script Magazine.

Ethan Suplee in My Name Is Earl, written by Greg Garcia.

Nell Leyshon interview

In The Telegraph, Charles Spencer talks to playwright and novelist Nell Leyshon about her burgeoning career.

It wasn't until after the birth of her second son 12 years ago that Leyshon started to write seriously. "I just thought, right, I'm going to write a novel. So I literally sat my six-month baby on my lap and wrote one. I got to the end of it, and thought, it's not good enough. So I wrote another one. And that was terrible. And then I did another one. And that wasn't good enough either." So with reckless pluck, she burnt them in her vegetable patch. "Dom kept asking me if this was what I wanted to do, and I said yes, it felt so good to get rid of it all."

Leyshon's new play, Comfort Me with Apples, is at Hampstead Theatre, from Jan 18-27, then touring until March 31. Her adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now is at Sheffield Lyceum from Feb 22-March 10, before transferring to the Lyric Hammersmith.

Golden Globe for Peter Morgan

Screenwriter and playwright Peter Morgan has won a prestigious Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for his script for The Queen. The award puts him in pole position for both the BAFTAs and the Oscars in the coming months.

Elizabeth I, written by Nigel Williams, won the Golden Globe for Best mini-series or film made for TV.

The Hollywood Standard

If you've got script formatting concerns (and want to make it in LA), screenwriter and blogger John August has a new book to recommend, and a few points to clarify.

Has radio comedy had its last laugh?

"The problem is that Radio 4 hasn't developed a really huge zeitgeisty show since Little Britain," says radio critic Will Hogkinson. "That's what Radio 4 is all about. I love shows like Ed Reardon's Week, but it could have been on air at any time in the past 10 years. They're still struggling to find that great of-the-moment comedy troupe."

"There's a very cosy, middle class, middle-aged feel to a lot of what's on air at the moment," says Vanessa Haynes, who develops comedy for production companies such as Celador. "Talent who get a show on Radio 4 tend to soften around the edges a bit."

Some argue that it is all about the dosh - "broadcast comedy would suffer if Radio 4 went away," says one agent, "but it pays so little that it's impossible for a writer or performer to focus without another income stream, so I see it as an intermediary level rather than an end in itself." Others think the industry has changed and Radio 4's role is unclear.

More from Stephen Armstrong in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Jacqueline Wilson at the Writers' Guild Centre

Date: Tuesday 6 February 2007, 6.30 - 8pm

Venue: the Writers' Guild Centre, 15 Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JN

Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson will give a talk at the Writers’ Guild Centre on the evening of Tuesday 6 February from 6.30pm – 8pm. The author of the popular Tracy Beaker series will discuss her experiences of working as a children’s writer.

Free refreshments will be provided before and after the event along with the opportunity to mingle with fellow guests.

Tickets for this event are £10 for Writers' Guild members. Tickets for non-members will be £20 but priority will be given to members of the Writers' Guild on this occasion. Tickets must be purchased in advance. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

To book your place, please contact Moe Owoborode at moe@writersguild.org.uk or on 020 7833 0777. Cheques should be sent to the Writers' Guild, 15 Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JN and made payable to the Writers' Guild of Great Britain.

Rehearsed reading: Leaving

You're invited to attend the first rehearsed reading at the new Writers’ Guild Centre. It will take place next Wednesday, 17th January at 8.00 pm (please note: not 7.00 pm as previously advertised).

The play is called Leaving, a comedy by Guild member Stanley Price. It tells the story of Carol who, after 27 frustrating years, finally walks out on Brian, a trumpeter in a symphony orchestra. Brian tries, rather loudly, to win her back….

Come along and enjoy the show and join us for a glass of wine afterwards and mingle with the cast and other members of Equity and the Writers’ Guild. We hope that rehearsed readings will become a regular event at the Writers’ Guild Centre and that members will be encouraged to put on their own shows right here.

Tickets: £6 (members of the Writers’ Guild and Equity), others £8.

To book a ticket please contact Anne Hogben 020 7833 0777 ext 201 or email anne@writersguild.org.uk.

BAFTA nominations

The nominations have been announced for the 2007 BAFTA Film Awards. They include:

Best original screenplay

• Guillermo Arriaga - Babel
• Michael Arndt - Little Miss Sunshine
• Guillermo del Toro - Pan's Labryinth
• Peter Morgan - The Queen
• Paul Greengrass - United 93

Best adapted screenplay

• Neal Purvis/Robert Wade/Paul Haggis - Casino Royale
• William Monahan - The Departed
• Aline Brosh McKenna - The Devil Wears Prada
• Peter Morgan/Jeremy Brock - The Last King Of Scotland
• Patrick Marber - Notes On A Scandal

The awards will be presented at a ceremony in London on 11 February.

Gwyneth Hughes interview

After two high profile true-life dramas for ITV (Cherished and Mysterious Creatures) Gywneth Hughes is one of the hottest TV drama writers around. Her new five part serial for BBC and HBO, Five Days, which starts in the UK on 23 January, looks set to confirm her status. I spoke to her earlier this week about Five Days and how her background as a documentary maker has informed her writing.

Can you describe your approach to writing an original story? Do you plot it all out first?

I don’t plot it out at all. I’m not sure how unusual that is but I do very little storylining. I have an idea about the story and an almost musical sense of what key it’s in and what the emotional temperature will be. But when I wrote the first episode of Five Days I had no idea what would happen in the subsequent four. I can do storylining – I had to when I wrote on The Bill – but I invariably throw it out once I start writing so there’s not much point. Stephen King talks about writing being almost like archaeology, where it feels as though you’re excavating a story that already exists, and that’s how it seems to me.

Five Days: written by Gwyneth Hughes, directed by Otto Bathurst and Simon Curtis.

Bernie Corbett: The year ahead

On the Writers' Guild website, General Secretary Bernie Corbett looks at work the Guild will be tackling in 2007.

The most important upcoming work is the renegotiation of the main BBC TV Drama Agreement. The livelihoods of many Guild members are dependent on the minimum rates and terms in this document and, with digital content and new media to be included, the negotiations will be more significant than ever.

Potter fanfic-er gets her own deal

The debut novel from a Chilean writer who shot to fame after writing her own "fanfic" version of JK Rowling's Harry Potter stories has been released.

La Septima M - The Seventh M - is the first of three books that 23-year-old Chilean journalism student Francisca Solar was contracted to write by publishers Random House, following the online success of her unofficial sixth Harry Potter story, Harry Potter and the Decline of the High Elves.

More from BBC News.

Costa winners

Among the winners of the Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Awards) announced yesterday was Stef Penney, as Nigel Reynolds reports in The Telegraph.

The most surprising story thrown up by the awards is that of 37-year-old Stef Penney, a film writer, whose debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, won this year's first novel award. A story of mystery, love and murder in a remote snow-bound settlement in northern Canada in the 1860s, it was praised by judges for its description of a deep winter landcsape.

But Penney, who lives in East London, disclosed today that she had never visited Canada. Because she had suffered from agoraphobia for 15 years, she had a fear of travelling and built up her picture of the country by reading the first-hand accounts of settlers, trappers, explorers and men of the Hudson Bay Company, in the reading room at the British Library.

She said: "I didn't like public transport and to begin with I had to go by car to the British Library. But parking was so expensive that I was forced to overcome my fear of travelling by bus."

The book was turned down by "quite a lot" of publishers, she said before it was picked up by the small house, Quercus. She said of her win today: "It's really hard to believe - it's extraordinary."

An end to the longest literary feud?

One of the world's iciest literary feuds, sealed with a punch-up in a cinema 30 years ago, is thawing as Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Marquez and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa prepare to publish together.

More from Giles Tremless in The Guardian.

Docudrama rates

All of the Guild's major TV agreements are likely to be renegotiated this year and one subject certain the be discussed is the rates paid for the drama element of docudrama. On the Guild's website, J.C. Wilsher and Isabelle Grey set out the arguments for drama in docudrama to be included in the minimum terms agreements.

Writers of TV drama should be getting TV drama rates and terms, whether they are commissioned by a drama or a factual department. Of course there may be ‘discounts’ from the full original drama rate – the dramatised sequences may only be a portion of the programme’s running time; storyline and underlying source or research material may have been provided.

Guillermo del Toro interview

Denis Faye talks to Guillermo del Toro for the Writers Guild of America, west.

You often give your characters comprehensive biographies before you even start writing. How comprehensive?

I like to know where they're coming from, what the story is with their parents, with their wife, with their children, why they were raised in a certain way. But with some movies I do it and some movies I don't. In Devil's Backbone, I did very extensive biographies. In Hellboy, I did very extensive biographies. In this one I didn't. I really knew who I was using as model for each character. I knew the person very well. I knew who I was targeting, and I just used that base to write them. I mean, I don't know any fascist Captains [like Captain Vidal], but I know people who have the same sociopath impulses as he does.

Sobol Award cancelled

The Sobol Award, a controversial new literary contest that offered agentless writers a $100,000 first prize and a contract with Simon & Schuster for the top three winners, has been canceled.

Officials acknowledged that the prize's entry fee and other contractual requirements had deterred would-be participants.

"No further manuscript submissions will be accepted," award organizers announced Monday on the Sobol Web site (http://www.sobolaward.com). "All writers who have submitted manuscripts will receive a full refund of their entry fee ($85) and our copies of the manuscripts will be destroyed and deleted from our system."

More from Hillel Italie for Associated Press.

The Trial Of Tony Blair

In the dock: Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair

The Trial Of Tony Blair, written by Alistair Beaton, will be the latest current affairs based drama to hit our TV screens when it appears on More 4 on Monday. There are interviews with Beaton and executive producer David Aukin in The Telegraph and Media Guardian (free registration required).

"The drama focuses on Blair's psychic disintegration because he can't silence his conscience over what happened in Iraq. It's based on the assumption that Blair is a man with some remaining decency and conscience and that the death of people in Iraq must haunt him," says Beaton. Indeed, the film's first scene finds Blair at confession (did I mention that he's recently, and to Cherie's delight, become a Catholic?), telling the priest: "I feel as though I have sins to confess. Mortal sins."

The slow birth of Lilies

Lilies, which begins on BBC One on Friday, spent almost a decade in development - as the series creator Heidi Thomas tells Paul Hoggart in The Times.

"The series is really a mosaic of oral history," says Thomas, and proceeds to itemise the origin of the colourful details with which the script is stuffed. Dadda’s hostility to his daughters’ priest, for instance: "My grandmother was Catholic and my grandfather was Protestant. When the priest called round every Friday, he would make him stand on newspaper just to show he didn’t approve of him being in the house. One of his daughters married a Catholic and he was just referred to as ‘the Fenian’. It was only when a cousin took up genealogy that we found out what the poor man’s name was."

Catherine Tyldesley, Daniel Rigby, Brian McCardie, Leanne Rowe and Kerrie Hayes in Lilies, created by Heidi Thomas, written by Heidi Thomas, Kate Gartside and Jonathan Harvey. (Photo: Matt Squire for BBC/World Productions)

Second productions

In The Guardian, Mark Ravenhill reflects on the difficulty of getting a second domestic production for a new play.

This absence of second productions is in some ways a good thing. It reflects the confidence of theatres outside London - and of arts organisations in general. Recent research, carried out by the TV channel Artsworld, found that London was only the ninth best city in the country for the arts, with Newcastle top. A few decades ago, theatres would have looked to see what were this year's hits in the capital, then dutifully produced them - but not now. Theatres in Liverpool, Southampton, Plymouth, Manchester or Birmingham have their own commissions and produce their own premieres. Every week sees a slew of new plays appearing across the country, often sparsely reviewed in the national press.

We have now created a situation in which there is a demand for hundreds of premieres across the country every year, often in studio theatres. But there is no promise of subsequent productions. Writers - realising there is very small financial reward for this, and small audiences - are soon lost to television and film.

Books by committee

Working Partners, a company that uses teams of editors and writers to create series fiction for children, is moving into the grown-ups market, reports Brandon Robshaw in The Independent.

Like it or not, this appears to be the future of commercial fiction. It's linked with the growing professionalism of writing, a trend that has seen degree courses in creative writing mushrooming in universities all over the country, with the Open University joining in last year.What is wrong with giving the reading public what it wants? Working Partners isn't perverting or corrupting public taste, but providing well-crafted, popular commercial fiction.

Do non-American writers have to join the WGA?

On his Artful Writer blog, Craig Mazin advises non-American writers who are working in the USA.

Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson: Curve

Woman-in-jeopardy thrillers have long been a popular staple of cinema. The terror the audience experiences while watching a vulnerable woman suffer through a horrible situation — "Wait Until Dark," "Alien," "High Tension," Emma Thompson in "Junior" — provides just the kind of visceral (and often perverse) pleasure we want from the movies.

Since these suspenseful films are almost uniformly written by men, though, the scenarios tend to play out as fantasies of either the malicious male subconscious or a romanticized version of a besieged woman's fortitude under extreme duress. Screenwriter Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson hopes to challenge this convention with her recent addition to the genre, "Curve." Her script doesn't veer from the genre's essential plot elements but lurches through a stripped-down narrative invested with both a specifically feminine mind-set and a harrowing, if unintended, subtext.

More from Jay A. Fernandez in The LA Times.

Agency prize for MA students

Students on City University's MA in Creative Writing (Novels) course are being offered the chance to win £1,500 and representation from the Christopher Little Literary Agency (CLLA) in a new competition.

CLLA are best known for picking up JK Rowling's work after it had been turned down by several other publishers and agents. So they probably have £1,500 to spare.

With the growth in creative writing MAs, could this be the first of many tie-ups with agencys or producers?

Drama Association of Wales - One Act Playwriting Competition

The Drama Association of Wales have launched their One Act Playwriting Competition 2007. The competition aims to encourage the writing of plays for amateur theatre in English and Welsh.

For 2007, they are seeking plays in three categories; an Open Section, plays suitable for performance by a cast of 16-25 year olds, and the best play in the Welsh language. In addition to cash awards, prize-winning plays will be published. Previous prizewinners have been published and performed as a result of promotion through their New Writing Scheme.

The deadline is 31 January 2007.

More details are available from the BBC Writersroom.

Boxing as art

In The Guardian, Marcel Berlins reflects on why boxing should have inspired so many great novels.

But why boxing? For one thing, a one-versus-one struggle lends itself perfectly to a good-versus-evil theme. It is the ultimate elemental sport, not dependent on artificial appendages like balls, rackets or bats, nor on the help of team-mates. Physical suffering is integral: it is the only sport specifically aimed at inflicting and receiving pain (which is perhaps why you "play" cricket, tennis, football etc but you do not play boxing). In social terms, boxing is the sport that allowed the uneducated poor, the shabby immigrant and the racially discriminated against to rise, not just to the top of their sport, but of their society and nation. And within boxers and the boxing milieu you find most of the emotions and tensions that make stirring literature.

Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, screenplay by Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. Toole, directed by Clint Eastwood.

ITV2 wants new comedy

ITV2 is launching a £10 million push into comedy and calling for scripted pieces, sitcoms and sketch shows, reports Liz Thomas in The Stage.

Zai Bennett, controller of ITV2, told The Stage: “I want comedy that is right for our viewers - the 16-24 demographic. I want to change people’s perception about what the channel offers. We have done that in part with imported hits such as Entourage and The Office: An American Workplace but we do need original comedy. Right now we are keen to look at scripts, try things out and get more things into development.”

ITV2 has been a quiet success as part of the Freeview platform but has mainly run imported programming and spin-offs from ITV1 reality and talent shows.

Guilt-free pleasures

It's nonsense to applaud acts such as Borat and Little Britain for being 'non-PC', says Stewart Lee in The Guardian.

There's a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break.

Screenwriter Sylvester Stallone

For the Writers Guild of America, west, Dylan Callaghan talks to screenwriter Sylvester Stallone about his new film, Rocky Balboa. He stars in it as well, apparently.

I've read that you like to write fast, so you write fast but you're a big rewriter?

Unbelievable. You have no idea.

Well give me an idea. How many drafts did you do with this film?

I would say like 20. I love to rewrite, I really do. What happens is I'll start just working a scene, and I'll touch up that dialogue and add a little situation here and then it grows. I also ask myself, “If there was no dialogue, what could I do to make this scene more interesting?” An example is the scene where Rocky goes to the graveyard. How do I say he goes there a lot? I don't want him saying, “You know, I go to this graveyard every day.” So I gave him a wooden folding chair that he puts back up in a tree when he leaves. That says that he lives in the graveyard.

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky Balboa, a film that he also wrote and directed.

Philippa Pearce obituaries

Children's author Philippa Pearce, whose books include Tom's Midnight's Garden, has died at the age of 86. The Guardian has an obituary by Stephanie Nettell.

To the end, and not only in her fiction, she had an innate wisdom and generous spirit that reached out to life: only last summer she enthralled a west Norfolk primary school ("she had them just where she wanted them", marvelled the teacher) while herself eager to learn about the local carrstone - dark brown sandstone containing grains of iron. She had been visiting the Seven Stories children's book centre in Newcastle when she became ill. She was a star, from that era nostalgically called the golden age of children's literature, whose reputation blazed beyond the passing fads of reviewers or children: to John Rowe Townsend, himself a major influence in children literature, "she was the most brilliant of us all".

There are also obituaries in The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Times.

The Espresso: printing on demand

A machine that electronically stores 2.5 million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven minutes is to be launched early next year. It prints in any language and has an upper limit of 550 pages. The 'Espresso' will be launched first in several US libraries. The company behind the project - On Demand Books - predicts that, within five years, it will be able to reproduce every book ever published.

More from Rowan Walker in The Observer.