Why Corrie beats Enders

On The Guardian TV blog, Ian Winwood argues that Corontation Street is way ahead of EastEnders, and that the BBC soap's writers are to blame.

...the EastEnders writing team have no understanding of the characters they've created. They don't like them, they don't trust them and (most of all) they don't credit them with any intelligence at all.

Abbott calls for more TV films

Award-winning writer Paul Abbott has continued his pressure on broadcasters, with a demand they commission more single films on television.

The outspoken creator of Channel 4’s hit series Shameless, which follows the lives of the dysfunctional Gallagher family on a sink estate in Manchester and has won popular and critical acclaim, said that the reluctance to make screenplays was a problem for the UK.

He warned: “If someone has a brilliant idea for a 90-minute film, they go to the UK Film Council, get funding and release it as a cinema-release film, instead of as TV film. The BBC rarely pays for TV films anymore.”

More from Liz Thomas in The Stage.

An Evening with David Nobbs

David Nobbs, the Guild’s President, will speak at the Writers’ Guild Centre in King’s Cross on Thursday 26th April .

David is the creator of the successful 1970s sitcom The Rise and Fall Of Regianld Perrin (adapted from his own Reginald Perrin novels). But there is far more to David’s career than Reggie Perrin. There’s his acclaimed series, A Bit Of A Do, which gained audiences of fourteen million for Yorkshire Television. There’s his work for many top comedians, including Frankie Howerd, Les Dawson and The Two Ronnies.

And above all there are his novels, sixteen of them, all of them humorous in tone, leading Jonathan Coe to state ‘David Nobbs is probably our finest post-war comic novelist.’ They include the four Perrin novels, the four Henry Pratt novels, and two of his own great favourites, Going Gently and his latest, Cupid's Dart, which started life as a 1981 TV play and was published on Valentine’s Day, 2007.

Tickets for this event will be £5 for Guild members and £7.50 for non-members and includes a free glass of wine .

To book , please send a cheque payable to the Writers' Guild, to ' An evening with David Nobbs', Writers' Guild of Great Britain, 15-17 Britannia Street, London, WC1X 9JN.

Bartlett switches to ITV

ITV Productions has hired BBC producer Kate Bartlett to run its merged London drama department. Ms Bartlett will join ITV Productions in the next couple of months as controller of drama in London.

She is taking over the merged drama departments formerly run by Michele Buck and Andy Harries, who are both leaving the broadcaster to join the independent production sector. The ITV Productions director, John Whiston, decided to merge the two departments after Ms Buck and Mr Harries announced that they were leaving.

More from Jason Deans in Media Guardian.

Writing spec scripts in the US

If you've ever dreamed of writing for an American TV series you'll probably know that, unlike in the UK where producers usually want to see originated work, the calling card is a spec script of an existing show. In Written By, some experts offer advice.

Marcy Ross [senior vice president of Current Programming, FOX]: It's always great to see that someone understands the nuts and bolts of scriptwriting and can have even a pedestrian understanding of a show's characters. That's the first layer. Then the second layer is when I'm sitting down to read 50 scripts, what are you going to tell me that's new about the character or gives me a heightened sense of reality or situation?

Jane Espenson [writer-producer, currently with an overall deal at NBC Universal]: A spec has to be two different things. It has to read as if it could be produced, and it has to be different. So it's an odd little dance.

Jane Espenson also has a blog about writing spec scripts.

Minority report

Publishing is still a white preserve, with new authors from ethnic minority groups struggling to break in, reports Gavin Stamp for BBC News.

Despite the mainstream success of the likes of Andrea Levy and Monica Ali, authors with roots in immigrant communities still represent a small fraction of the industry's annual output.

This has inevitably raised questions about whether the background of key decision-makers in the industry limits the range of books being commissioned.

Samenua Sesher, director of the Decibel diversity awareness programme at the Arts Council England, says the make-up of the industry means it has missed opportunities to appeal to minority audiences through successful recent genres such as chick lit.

"Publishers need to try and cast their net a bit wider and broaden their links," she says.

Shooter - Jonathan Lemkin

Shooter trailer


In The LA Times, Jay A. Fernanadez explains how Jonathan Lemkin's adaptation of Stephen Hunter's novel Point Of Impact (for a film called Shooter, directed by Antoine Fuqua), has succeeded where numerous previous attempts have failed.

Like a precision marksman with only one shot to nail his target, Jonathan Lemkin crawled into this landscape littered with discarded screenplays and hit an unexpected bull's-eye: Lemkin's Page 1 rewrite gained the film a star (Mark Wahlberg), a director and a fast-tracked greenlight off a mere second draft.

"I had a great advantage of being able to look on the map and see where the quicksand was, because they had already gone down there," Lemkin says of his ultimately successful approach to the film, which opens Friday. (His organizational approach to the 528-page book involved 1,200 color-coded notecards spread across an 8-by-24-foot bulletin board behind his desk.)

Manda Levin returns to BBC Drama

Manda Levin is returning to BBC drama production as creative director, replacing Sally Woodward Gentle.

Ms Levin, a former BBC drama producer, is currently head of development at Kudos Pictures, the feature film arm of the independent producer behind Life on Mars, Spooks and Hustle.

The BBC drama production creative director role fell vacant earlier this month, when Ms Woodward Gentle quit the corporation to join independent producer Carnival Films.

More from Jason Deans in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Protect the Human Playwriting Competition

Protect the Human is a new playwriting competition run by iceandfire theatre company and Amnesty International UK, culminating in Amnesty's 'Protect the Human Week' in October 2007.

Protect the Human are looking for compelling and original plays that imaginatively interpret iceandfire's mission statement of: "Telling the real life stories of individuals who have been displaced as a result of conflict."

The closing date for entries is 14 May 2007 . Thanks to BBC Writersroom for the link.

Blue 5 - Royal Exchange Theatre

Do you have new and emerging work to share? Why not apply to be part of BLUE 5 – the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester's three-day festival of emerging work, staged from 26–28 July.

The search is now on for more flourishing and established artists based in the North West to have their new work showcased at the Exchange. Previous showcases have been successful sell-outs and raised the profile of many of the region's most imaginative practitioners in live performance.

The deadline for entries is 8 May 2007. Thanks to BBC Writersroom for the link.

Daily Mail first novel competition

The Daily Mail and Transworld have launched a competition for debut novelists.

Transworld will publish the Daily Mail debut novel of the year in April 2008 and will offer a deal of at least £30,000 to the winning author. This is a chance to get your novel published by a leading publishing house with the imprimatur of the Daily Mail - something many an author would envy.

The closing date for entries is 2 July 2007.

Hollywood and history

Trailer for 300

Controversy over the historical accuracy of the film 300 (screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon, from the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley), released in the UK today, is in a rich Hollywood tradition, reports Greig Watson for the BBC.

The heroic westerner vs tyrannical Persian theme of 300 - based on Frank Miller's graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC - has sparked indignation from some commentators in the US, and brought protests from the Iranian authorities.

And while not every movie provokes an international incident, bending the facts to fit the film is nothing new - as film historian Kevin Brownlow reveals.

"In his 1927 epic Napoleon, director Abel Gance showed his hero at the Club des Cordeliers when the Marseillaise was first sung. He was informed that Napoleon had not been present. 'He is now,' he said."

Trailer for Napoleon

Ofcom permits ITV1 children's cut

As Mark Sweeney reports for Media Guardian (free registration required), communications industries regulator Ofcom has agreed to allow ITV1 to reduce its children's programming this year from an average of eight hours a week to about five hours a week.

The five hours each week are not subject to scheduling restrictions, and ITV1 does not need to run the programmes in its traditional afternoon weekday slot. A proportion of the programmes will run on weekends.

"Having taken into account the opinion of Ofcom, ITV confirms that children's output across 2007 will average around five hours of programming per week across ITV1 hours," said the broadcaster.

The campaign to Save Kids TV continues...

BAC looks likely to be AOK

On The Guardian Theatre blog, Lyn Gardner reports some welcome news about funding for an important venue.

When back in January it was announced that Wandsworth council intended to withdraw annual funding of £100,000 to Battersea Arts Centre and raise the peppercorn rent to a mighty £270,000 per year, it looked as if it might be curtains for the south west London venue which has become one of British theatre's most influential centres for emerging artists.

But after a couple of uncertain months, there are at long last reasons to smile in SW11 with the announcement this afternoon of a deal reached with the council which will see Wandsworth giving BAC annual funding of £85,000 for the next two years and the transference of the Grade 11 listed building to an independent theatre preservation trust on a 999 year lease.

Publishers rush to digitise

Worried about the growth of Google Book Search (previously known as Google Print), publishers are rushing to digitise their books, reports David Derbyshire in The Telegraph.

HarperCollins plans to have digitised its collection of around 25,000 titles - most of them long out of print - by the end of next year.

Many in the industry believe that unless they take pre-emptive action, they could lose out to internet giants.

Google's project to digitise thousands of books has been opposed by the American Authors' Guild, but Google have defended their work.

We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world -- especially since any copyright holder can exclude their books from the program. What’s more, many of Google Print’s chief beneficiaries will be authors whose backlist, out of print and lightly marketed new titles will be suggested to countless readers who wouldn’t have found them otherwise.

As long as copyright is respected then it's hard to see digitisation as anything but a good thing for authors, whoever is doing it. The so-called Long Tail effect of internet retailing has already helped smaller-selling authors and anything that makes it easier to buy books, whether on paper or digitally, must surely be a good thing.

Update: Further reflections on the subject from Victor Keegan.

Interesting things are happening on a variety of fronts that are changing the way books are found, read and talked about, and in almost every case for the good. Even while you are reading this, Google and others are scanning libraries of books - including the Bodleian at Oxford - to make tomes that were hitherto hidden available for all to read; in the case of the millions of out-of-copyright and "orphaned" ones, where ownership is unknown, for free.

Message for young playwrights: don't be so boring

In The Guardian, playwright Anthony Neilson says that too many writers are boring their audience.

Boring an audience is the one true sin in theatre. We've been boring audiences for decades now, and they've responded by slowly withdrawing their patronage. I don't care that the recent production of The Seagull at the Royal Court was sold out. To 95% of the population, the theatre (musicals aside for now) is an irrelevance. Of that 95%, we have managed to lure in maybe 10% at some point in their lives, and we've so swiftly and thoroughly bored them that they've never returned. They're not the ones who broke the contract. They paid their money and expected entertainment; we sent them back into the night feeling bored, bullied and baffled.

The Writers' Co-Op

Thanks to Danny Stack and MovieQuill, for a link to a fascinating story by Michael Fleming for Variety about the creation of a writers' co-op in Hollywood.

And if the idea of a co-op conjurs up images of malnourished idealists struggling to earn enough to pay for their next cup of FairTrade coffee, think again. This co-op is based at Warner Brothers and is the brainchild of John Wells, Nick Kazan and Tom Schulman. The aim is to get a better deal for screenwriters and to bring them closer to the heart of the prodcution.

Over the next four years, the Writers Co-Op will generate at least 18 scripts from writers who will risk their usually high upfront salaries for the reward of receiving first-dollar gross, the right to participate as producers and a guarantee they will not be rewritten without their consultation and approval. The scribes will also have a say in the decision making process from development all the way to post-production....

"This company gives writers an unprecedented role in the development and production of their films," said Schulman. "If this model works, we hope others will emulate it."

Will any UK Writers be willing to try it over here?

British Short Screenplay Competition

The 2007 British Short Screenplay Competition is now accepting entries. The cost is £25 for entries received by 27 April 2007 or £35 for entries received by 22 June 2007.

The winner will have their film produced by Kaos Films, the company behind the competition. They are supported by the National Film and Television School, The Times and a variety of other sponsors.

Although some writers might feel that the entry fee is prohibitive, it is one of the few highly regarded short film script contests and there is a guarantee that the winning film will be made.

Do women writers lack imagination?

In the Independent, Suzi Feay reports on a controversial critique from the Orange Prize panel chair.

Muriel Gray, novelist, television presenter and this year's chair of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which male writers are not eligible), accompanied the announcement of the longlist with an accusation that, by and large, the writers this year's panel assessed lacked imagination, and focused too narrowly on their own lives and personal issues.

Women writers don't work hard enough to escape from their own gender and circumstances - in short, says Gray, they're failing to make things up, surely a prerequisite for good, absorbing fiction. She's coined a phrase, rural schoolteacher syndrome, to describe the phenomenon: "the delusory condition that fools the sufferer into believing that an experience, say as ordinary as being a rural school teacher, is so interesting and unique that it's almost compulsory to chronicle it ... thinly disguised as fiction".

Characters over plot

On the Broadcast blog, British director Jon Sen explains what he thinks gives US TV drama the edge over shows from the UK.

I think the real reason why American drama series manage to inspire such devotion is because of what the programme makers do before they start shooting. We've all heard about the huge writing teams and the triple-decker salaries and that's got to make a difference. But more importantly, American writers have always really understood that an audience is loyal to characters not to plot.

Marina Lewycka interview

In The Times, Stefanie Marsh talks to Marina Lewycka about her bestselling debut, A Short History Of Tractors In Ukranian, and the challenge of following it up.

It is notoriously impossible to predict with any real accuracy what will fly off the shelves at bookstores, and the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, for one, had reasons to believe that A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian, Lewycka’s sensational debut, had all the ingredients of a catastrophic dud. When she sent off her manuscript to Kavanagh’s offices she received a straight rejection — unnecessarily crushing, I thought, for containing the words “we cannot summon sufficient enthusiasm”.

Lewycka suspects that her precious manuscript went straight into the slush pile unread: “I think editors and agents only want to commission books.”

The Times also has more about her new book, Two Caravans, as well as an extract.

He opens the barn door and they wade into the roiling sea of chickens. The chickens squawk and screech and try to flap out of their way, but there is nowhere for them to go. They try to flutter upwards but their wings are too weak for their overgrown bodies and they just scramble desperately on top of each other, kicking up a terrible stinking dust of feathers and faeces. Tomasz feels something live crunch under his foot, and hears a squawk of pain. He must have stepped on one, but really it is impossible not to.

Classic twists

In The Guardian, Jed Mercurio talks to fellow writers about the art of adapting novels for the screen.

[Steven] Bochco was one of the creators of the 1970s TV series The Invisible Man. "We pretty much started from scratch, with the only element remaining intact being the title," he remembers. [Darren] Star adds: "I was attracted by the title Sex and the City. I thought it was very catchy." And this sums it up for me. We writers want the titles of these adaptations, so they will bring in the audience; when we've got their attention, we want to show them how original we can be.

October Road

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard TV commissioners say that they don't want comedy or dramas based around the media. It's not a world the mass audience is interested in or understands, they insist.

Strange then, how many comedies and dramas are based around the media in its various forms: Extras, Alan Partridge and Ugly Betty, for example, have all overcome the perceived shortcoming of their subject matter.

A new American drama, however, looks like it might face a tougher challenge breaking into the mainstream. October Road, written by Josh Applebaum, André Nemec and Scott Rosenberg, is about an author returning to the hometown he exposed in his best-selling novel.

The pilot episode has a prime-time slot on US network ABC but Gina Bellafante in the New York Times is not impressed.

Should you already hold the view that young writers are hideously self-regarding, pillaging the intimate emotional property of their closest friends and relations, then “October Road,” a drama beginning on ABC this evening, will do nothing to change your mind even though it seems intent on trying.

But one group of viewers who, I suspect, will be watching, is writers. We all love seeing our own profession on screen, even if it's only to howl about how inaccurately it's being represented.

There's no news yet as to whether Ocotber Road will come to the UK. But another American media drama, Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, will be shown on Channel 4 some time this year. Like American writer and blogger Ken Levine, you might end up loving to hate it. But I bet you'll watch it.

Muscial could be magic for Brocklehurst

Question: what has been the highest grossing drama of all time - Titanic, Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings?

Answer: None of the above. The biggest box office takings of all have been for Andrew Lloyd Webber's muscial, Phantom Of The Opera (lyrics by Charles Hart, book and additional lyrics by Richard Stigloe, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux) - around $3.2 billion. Muscials really are big business.

So, congratulations to writer Danny Brocklehurst who, it was announced yesterday, has written a show based around the songs of Take That that will be opening in Manchester later this year.

Could it do as well as the ABBA musical Mama Mia, written by Catherine Johnson, which has so far amassed box office takings of around $2 billion?

Take That don't quite have the Swedish group's global appeal and the band have distanced themselves from the production, but with two recent number one singles, a number one album and a sell-out tour, the group's current popularity certainly bodes well for Brocklehurst's musical.

Jonathan Lethem's Promiscuous Materials

American author Jonathan Lethem has come up with a new approach to selling options to his work. In a project he's calling Promiscuous Materials, Lethem is offering the right to adapt any of a selection of his stories for the price of $1. The main condition is that "films be held to the length of half an hour or less, keeping them firmly in the category of 'short'. Similarly, I'd ask that playwrights keep to a 'one-act', or forty-five minute, limit."

The options are non-exclusive but if the adaptors do make money Lethem says he'll be owed nothing.

If someone working from one of these stories does find distribution or other support that brings financial reward, I'm delighted, as I would be for any artist. For me, while I'm happy to make money from partnerships elsewhere, The Promiscuous Stories aren't about that.

He sees it as a literary equivalent to Open Source software.

With his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, Lethem has taken an even more innovative approach.

On May 15th I’ll give away a free option on the film rights to my novel You Don’t Love Me Yet to a selected filmmaker. In return for the free option, I’ll ask two things:

1. I’d like the filmmaker to pay (something) for the purchase of the rights if they actually make a film: two percent of the budget, paid when the completed film gets a distribution deal. (I’ll wait until distribution to get paid so a filmmaker without many funds can work without having to spend their own money paying me).

2. The filmmaker and I will make an agreement to release all ancillary rights to the film (and its source material, the novel), five years after the film’s debut. In other words, after a waiting period during which those rights would still be restricted, anyone who cared to could make any number of other kinds of artwork based on the novel’s story and characters, or the film’s: a play, a television series, a comic book, a theme park ride, an opera – or even a sequel film or novel featuring the same characters. For that matter, they can remake the film with another script and new actors. In my agreement with the filmmaker, those ancillary rights will be launched into the public domain.

Whatever you think of the terms that Lethem is seeking, at the very least he is attempting to wrest some control back for the author in the optioning process. As his Promiscuous Materials project shows, his interest is in getting work made and the terms of his option for You Don't Love Me Yet are surely a welcome change from the complete control normally sought by buyers in these circumstances.

Francis Hopkinson to leave Channel 4

Channel 4's senior commissioning editor for drama, Francis Hopkinson, is leaving the broadcaster to join former ITV colleague Andy Harries in the independent sector.

Mr Hopkinson is understood to have handed in his notice and will depart at the end of May, after around two years at Channel 4.

He is said to be planning to join the new independent TV and film production company being set up by Mr Harries, who is leaving his job as ITV Productions controller of drama, comedy and films later this year.

More from Jason Deans on Media Guardian (free registration required).

Grade says no future for children's shows on ITV1

ITV Chairman Michael Grade has told MPs that children's programming has no future on ITV1 reports Chris Tryhorn on Media Guardian (free registration required).

"In terms of the valuable air time on a main network like ITV1, maintaining a loss-leading service for children seems to be unlikely to be sustained in the medium to long term," he said.

Pressed if that meant there would be no children's programming in the main ITV1 schedule in the long term, he replied: "I can't see it, no."

At the moment ITV is still bound to show eight hours of children's programmes a week on ITV1, but so far it has failed to persuade media watchdog Ofcom to reduce that obligation.

Once analogue switch off is completed in 2012, ITV hopes it can move all its children's programmes to CITV, the free-to-air digital channel launched a year ago, which it says is already available in 90% of homes.

BBC scripts online

The BBC have made more comedy and drama scripts available online, including the first ever episode of Life On Mars by Matthew Graham.

David Masson obituary

David Masson, the influential science fiction short story writer whose collections included The Caltraps of Time (1968), died last week at the age of 91. There's an obituary by Christopher Priest in The Guardian.

Masson leapt to prominence in the science-fiction world with his first published story, Traveller's Rest (1965). It is difficult to convey the seminal impact this remarkable story had on the small but influential group of writers, critics and readers who closely followed Michael Moorcock's New Worlds in those days. It depicts an apocalyptic war being fought across a time-dilated landscape, where all human senses are subjected to the distortions of relativity.

Without wanting to get too morbid, it does feel as if a generation of sci-fi writers has now almost entirely passed away. The last six months, for example, has seen the deaths of British sci-fi TV pioneer Nigel Kneale, and celebrated American 'pulp' magazine contributor, Jack Williamson. The influence of their work on popular culture, however, remains as strong as ever.

Josie Rourke joins The Bush

Josie Rourke has been appointed as artistic director of west London’s Bush Theatre, replacing Mike Bradwell, reports Alistair Smith in The Stage.

“The Bush inspires, nurtures and champions playwrights and I am thrilled to have been invited to become its artistic director. I look forward to working with Fiona Clark, the directors and the staff of the theatre to take The Bush into its bold and promising future.”

Russell T Davies interview

It's been a long time since a TV writer was as influential as Russell T Davies. Not only has he overhauled BBC One's Saturday night schedule with the return of Doctor Who, he also seems to have restored the faith of the entire industry in prime-time family drama. In The Telegraph he talks to Richard Johnson.

Doctor Who, which is just about to begin its third series under Davies, first appeared in 1963; it is now the longest-running science fiction television series in the world. With good reason, reckons Davies - it's down to the writing.

'Take The Talons of Weng Chiang, for example. Watch episode one. It's the best dialogue ever written. It's up there with Dennis Potter. By a man called Robert Holmes. When the history of television drama comes to be written, Robert Holmes won't be remembered at all because he only wrote genre stuff. And that, I reckon, is a real tragedy.'

Freema Agyeman and David Tennant prepare for series three of the new-look Doctor Who.

Russell T Davies also has a letter in The Guardian today, defending John Inman's portrayal of Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? (written by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft).

It seems a bit easy to condemn both John Inman and Mr Humphries for the failings of a bygone age (G2, March 9). As a young, gay viewer, back then, I loved that character, and even watching it now, it strikes me that in a sitcom full of failure and frustration - as the best British sitcoms are - Mr Humphries was the only one with an active, successful sex life. He's the only character in Are You Being Served? who is essentially happy. And that's how I will remember him.

Authors getting poorer

New research reveals that, while superstar authors may be thriving, most novelists are struggling to make a living, reports Cole Moreton in The Independent.

The average author earns about £16,000, a third less than the national average wage, it is revealed. So what? They're doing what they love. But hidden behind that figure released by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a grimmer truth: when you take away the superstars who are earning shedloads, the actual figure for the rest is closer to £4,000.

That's less than it was last time anyone looked, seven years ago, and far less than the distant days when the Net Book Agreement kept prices high. Forget living on baked beans in a garrett; this is barely enough to buy stale bread and a tarpaulin for shelter.

PEN marks International Women's Day

Yesterday the international writers' organisation, PEN, marked International Women's Day by highlighting the cases of women writers who have been silenced, imprisoned or even killed.

Harassment and intimidation of writers in Vietnam has long been of concern to PEN. Among them is Tran Khai Thanh Thuy, an author and essayist who was arrested briefly in September 2006 for articles that she posted on the internet. She was again briefly detained a few weeks later for publishing further essays. She is editor of the dissident magazine To Quoc (Fatherland). In October she was subjected to a “People’s Court” in Hanoi where police gathered 300 people to denounce and humiliate her, and her home had been attacked by mobs calling her a traitor and a prostitute. Police refused to provide protection. She is now living under virtual house arrest.

Joe Eszterhas interview

Legendary screenwriter Joe Eszterhas talks to Susan Dominus in The Telegraph about his new book, The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!.

'I think there are all these phonies out there who don't know what they're talking about giving screenwriters advice,' says Eszterhas, his hands on his knees as he sits on the couch facing the big-screen television where he and his sons like to watch basketball.

'I've learnt a lot over the course of 30 years, and I wanted to encourage screenwriters to really take seriously what they write, not just to sell out and take the money, but to put their hearts and guts behind it to write a book that would be funny and inspirational and tell the truth about what it's really like.'

Abbott blasts commissioners

TV writer Paul Abbott has attacked commissioners for lacking the courage to launch shows with a long run, reports Liz Thomas in The Stage.

“The way the system works at the moment [means that] commissioners give you three or six episodes at first and it is two years before they’ll commit to ten. The commissioners are gutless, because it is expensive to make TV drama and they won’t take the risk. But I think it’s important for us to learn to tell audiences that we have got something good, and if we commissioned 16 episodes straight away then the audience will appreciate that investment, and they’ll feel well looked after.”

Martin Crimp interview

In The Guardian Maddy Costa talks to playwright Martin Crimp about his career so far.

When Crimp talks, he sounds fascinatingly like someone delivering one of his own plays. His intonation rises and falls, bringing drama to every sentence; he weighs words just as his characters do, assessing them for correctness. He describes himself as "text obsessive"; perhaps his voice is so recognisable in his work because he speaks every line aloud himself, checking its shape and rhythm. "That's my own private craziness," he says, "talking to myself."

James Vanderbilt - Zodiac

Zodiac trailer


Zodiac, written by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith and directed by David Fincher has been getting rave reviews in America. It opens in the UK next month. For the Writers Guild of America, west, Denis Faye talks to Vanderbilt.

The audience is going to spend 120 minutes or so in the grimy, dark world of Zodiac. You, the writer, spent over a year there. How'd you cope with that?

I honestly think part of being a writer is that you deal in dark shit so you don't bring it out in your real life. I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky guy because I can deal with dark shit and get it out on the page and not have it follow me home.

The other side of it is that it's funny. We talked to a lot of homicide detectives and the surviving victims of the Zodiac, and there's just a lot of humor to it, a lot of dark humor. You watch shows like Homicide, and you see them joking over dead bodies. That's what you sort of need to do to decompress and not think about it. I remember the first time Brad Fischer and I went out to one of the murder sites up at Lake Berryessa. We went there with Robert Graysmith. He showed us around. We went back to the hotel and got blind drunk. It was ridiculous. We're in the bar telling strangers about this experience. It's just this horrible stuff, but at the same time, there's something about being able to excise it by putting it out there on the page or putting it out there on the screen.

Edward Albee - The Lady from Dubuque

Twenty-seven years after a short run on Broadway, The Lady from Dubuque by Edward Albee is finally getting it's British premiere. In The Telegraph, Jasper Rees talks to the author and the director, Anthony Page.

Such is Albee's abhorrence of directorial egotism, and protectiveness of his own dialogue, that he nurses an ambition to write a short experimental play in which the actors will speak at the behest of an actual conductor.

"If it's written properly, there will be a proper relationship between what is conducted and how the actors naturally speak the lines."

Channel 4 scales back drama

Channel 4 will fail to fulfil its stated ambition of showing a major new drama every month this year or in 2008.

The broadcaster's commissioning editor for drama, Liza Marshall, has admitted that Channel 4 would not be meeting its target of 12 flagship pieces per year.

But Ms Marshall denied industry rumours that the tally would be cut by as much as half.

"There is likely to be a refocusing and we are going to do less than 12 - but we are certainly going to do more than six," she said.

More from Ben Dowell in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Websites for writers

This event was announced to Guild members in the e-bulletin on Friday, but it's also open to non-members (although for £7.50 rather than £5). I've already been contacted by lots of people requesting topics to be covered (for example, the best website design software, search optimisation and building wikis), so if you have a suggestion please enter a comment to this post.

Websites for writers

19th April 2007, 7.00-9.30pm. The Writers' Guild Centre, King's Cross

If you have a website or are thinking of getting one, this event is for you.

For beginners there will be easy-to-follow advice on creating websites and blogs. Plus, hear from other writers about their experiences: how can you use a website to publicise your work and what are the best ways of attracting people to your site?

For those with web experience there will be advice on how to make the most of your online presence. What are the new tools that could improve your site? Are you following the principles of good web design and usability? How could new technology change the way you work?

Entry price includes a free glass of wine. Places are limited so tickets must be booked in advance. To book please send a cheque for £5 (£7.50 for non-Guild members) payable to WGGB to 'Website event', WGGB, 15 Britannia Street, London WC1X 9JN.

Channel 4 - Coming Up

The Channel 4 Coming Up competition has now been opened to any writer who has not had an original drama broadcast.

Coming Up is the only talent scheme currently in the UK where new film-makers have the opportunity to make an authored drama with a guaranteed network broadcast. Now in its seventh year, IWC and Channel 4 continue their commitment to innovation, experimentation and new voices.

We will make up to eight challenging and individual films from the best emerging talent in the UK. Each film will be for a half-hour Channel 4 slot and we are looking for:

• Bold ideas
• Strong voices
• Originality
• Ambition
• Wit
• Films that push boundaries in a way that wouldn't / couldn't be done in mainstream drama
• Films that are contemporary
• Films that can be shot in 4 days on a limited budget

Blog stats - Feb 2007

Most writing blogs - like most blogs in general - are very coy about their traffic stats, but screenwriter and blogger John August is an exception. In a post about the impact of having one of his articles mentioned on the link-recommendation site, Digg, he has published his February blog stats. You can see why he's not shy: he's had more than 85,000 visits and 130,000 page views.

Still, in the interests of the free exchange of information this blog refuses to be cowed. Here's our monthly stats for February.

The industry standard measure, in fact, is monthly unique users (what Google Analytics calls Absolute Unique Users) - i.e. the number of different people who visit your site. This blog's total for February 2007 was 1,846.

The big Oscar winner: writers

Conventional wisdom holds that "The Departed," by winning four Oscars, including best picture and director, was the big winner Sunday night at the Academy Awards. But for my money, the evening's truly triumphant were the screenwriters.

Going beyond even the terrific choice of using classic (although uncredited) quotes from screenplays for such Oscar-winning films as "Silence of the Lambs" (Ted Tally), "Jerry Maguire" (Cameron Crowe) and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (William Goldman) on the show's promotional billboards, the ceremony was arguably the most screenwriter-friendly in modern history and, hopefully, a sign that their part in this great and glorious distraction is beginning to get its due recognition.

More from Jay A. Fernandez in the LA Times.

Top writers' favourite books

Leading writers from Britain, America and Australia have been asked to list their top ten works of literature, and the results will be published in a book next month.

The top-rated work was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. His other great epic, War and Peace, came third. Two other Russians also made the top ten. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita came fourth and the stories of Anton Chekov ninth.

More from Dalya Alberge in The Times.

In my own words

Stephen King, Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh have all put fictional authors into their works. Is it escapism or egotism, asks Mark Lawson in The Guardian.

Agatha Christie's fictional stand-in is Ariadne Oliver, a best-selling lady detective writer who Christie's own sleuth Hercule Poirot reads for distraction while working on a case (in 1963's The Clocks, for example) and who frequently joins him as a deputy in detection. With a playfulness that some might find surprising in such a generally plain stylist, Christie sets up fi ctional mirrors. Oliver's recurring character is Sven Hjerson, a Finnish detective whose adventures frequently test Miss Oliver's very limited knowledge of Finland, in what can be presumed to be a reference to Christie's irritations in satisying an audience desperate for more instalments about a fastidious Belgian.

Christie also used Oliver as a sort of authorial version of a newspaper's ombudsman, admitting to her own errors in previous plots through Oliver's anecdotes about her regrettable slips.

ITV lines up a summer of drama

ITV are planning to replace reality show Love Island with a number of dramas this summer, reports Liz Thomas in The Stage.

A spokeswoman told The Stage: “Traditionally in the summer we have not aired very many first run, original dramas, but this year that is the plan. The message is that actually, instead of being the part of the schedule which is traditionally lighter this year, the summer line-up looks more like a spring or even an autumn one.

“It is absolutely a conscious decision to opt for more drama, and also more entertainment, rather than come up with another reality-type show. Drama has always been a strength at ITV and we know that we are defined as a channel by our drama - that is what the audience likes.”

Oscar winners

Just in case you missed it, the winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar on Sunday was Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine). Best Adapted Screenplay went to William Monahan (The Departed, based on a screenplay by Siu Fai Mak and Felix Chong).

Little Miss Sunshine Trailer

Philip K. Dick

The fame of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who died 25 years ago next week, has grown in the years since his death, thanks largely to films based on his work, but also to changes in the world, or at least to our perception of it, that were prefigured in his writing.

More from Lisa Tuttle in The Times.

Eurpean Screenwriting Manifesto

Earlier this month at the Berlin International Film Festival, The European Screenwriters’ Manifesto was launched with the backing of 21 national writers’ guilds representing around 9,000 writers.

Finalised at the European Conference on Screenwriting last November in Thessaloniki, the Manifesto is a bold declaration of beliefs about the role of screenwriters and calls on others to recognise their contribution.

Read more on the WGGB website.

David Eldridge's first night

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to have a new play (or, in this case, a new version of an Ibsen play) opening at a major London theatre, read playwright David Eldridge blogging about press night for John Gabriel Borkman at The Donmar.

Tuesday night's press night was particularly crazy, and not particularly full of the glitterati as there were so many reviewers and journalists there. The Donmar Warehouse holds approximately 250 audience and on our opening night about 60 of those seats were taken by the press. I had had three or four Jack Daniels to steady my nerves and in a theatre as intimate as this one the critics literally encircle you. As I said Jane Edwardes and Matt Wolf were to my left, to my right and only a couple of yards away were Nicholas de Jongh and John Peter and a couple of yards in front were Michael Billington, Charles Spencer and Susannah Clapp.

Verity Bargate Award 2007

Soho Theatre has launched the 2007 Verity Bargate Award, one of the most prestigious competitions for unproduced plays.

The winner will receive £5000 (in respect of an exclusive option), a residency at Soho Theatre and the chance to have their play produced at Soho Theatre.

The deadline is 6 July 2007.

Radio gaga

In The Guardian, Zoe Williams launches a broadside on Radio 4's Afternoon Play.

It's all very well calling Radio 4 drama inexplicably bad, but someone must be able to explain it. So I am going to make a stab at this. And then later, I am going to stab the person who commissions these plays.

Are good authors always good people?

Why do we so often assume that good authors should be good themselves, asks on The Guardian Books Blog?

It is not only that we expect writers to navigate the choppy waters of moral confusion; we expect them to be good in private. The Bloomsberries slept with everyone with a pulse; now, there is a huge fuss if a writer so much as changes his agent. William Boyd is almost as famous for his happy marriage as he is for his novels. If Zadie Smith decided to make like the Beats, ingesting every substance known to man and getting into bar brawls, there would probably be questions asked in the House.

Publicists for scriptwriters

You didn't realise scriptwriters used Hollywood publicists to help win awards, did you? In the LA Times, J.A. Fernandez explains how it works.

Ronni Chasen has long represented such writers as Robin Swicord ("Memoirs of a Geisha"), Jim Sheridan ("In America") and Julian Fellowes, whom she helpfully steered to an Oscar win for his "Gosford Park" screenplay in 2002. "We tried to create a very focused campaign that illuminated for people the fact that this was such an intricately crafted screenplay on every level," Chasen says. "It was important for people to be able to hear from him how this was created. For me, it's bringing into focus the writer's contribution."

Pinter in Pinter

A date for the diary of all Harold Pinter fans: the man himself will be appearing in The Homecoming on Radio 3 on Sunday March 18. The rest of the casting - Michael Gambon, Sam West and Rupert Graves - isn't too shabby either.

More details from Media Guardian (free registration required).

Amanda Ross

In The Times, Stefanie Marsh meets Amanda Ross, the woman behind Richard and Judy's Book Club.

Irony is a time-honoured literary device, any writer can tell you that. And it’s ironic that publishers – traditionally fussy Oxbridge types with English degrees – are having to suck up to someone who studied drama at Birmingham University and who cheerily admits that “I don’t really know anything about books at all”. When 44-year-old Ross, a powerful TV producer, founded the Richard & Judy Book Club three years ago, publishers barely deigned to look up from their proofs. Daytime TV, they assumed, was the domain of council-house illiterates and Daz adverts. Another nail in the coffin of Britain’s literary culture, they lamented.

But Ross had a hawk’s eye for storytelling.

Of the 100 bestselling titles last year, 21 were by authors discussed on the Richard & Judy Book Club – all chosen personally by Ross. Publishers couldn’t console themselves with the thought that she had dumbed down Britain’s bookshops because in fact she had done the opposite. “I don’t know what a literary book is. As long as it has a good story, who cares?” she has said.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

In Wired magazine Clive Thompson reports on a new novel/game.

I was thrilled when Nintendo began advertising its new title Hotel Dusk: Room 215 not as a game but an "interactive mystery novel." Sure enough, it's pretty much what I'd dreamed of: You hold your DS sideways like a book, and watch as the pages come to life. Specifically, Hotel Dusk tells the noir tale of Kyle Hyde, a 33-year-old cop who shot his turncoat partner, hit the bottle and now works as a washed-up private dick who "finds things that don't want to be found." In the eponymous hotel, Hyde finds clues that seems to lead to his former partner.

More Peter Morgan

It's not every day that a British screenwriter becomes the talk of the town, but after scooping this blog's highly prestigiouswriter of the year accolade, Peter Morgan goes from strength to strength.

After yesterday's appearance in the LA Times (see below), today he's interviewed by Victoria Lindrea on the BBC News website.

Hollywood insiders "love to mock their own", explains Morgan, but he claims that, in reality, Tinseltown is a far cry from the Hollywood of screenwriters' imagination.

"It's far more sober here than one imagines. It's full of people who are very abstemious and workaholic - and it feels like a community of lawyers rather than that Hollywood of drug-taking excess.

"Everybody is very young, very thin and no-one eats puddings."

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."