Creative Archive Licence

The BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute and The Open University have launched the Creative Archive Licence.The Creative Archive Licence is inspired by the Creative Commons system, a flexible copyright arrangement pioneered in the US.

The Creative Archive Licence will give a new generation of media users legal access to material which they can use to express their creativity and share their knowledge - all completely free of charge.

The Licence has been launched following a commitment in the BBC's Building Public Value document, in which it pledged to "help establish a common resource which will extend the public's access while protecting the commercial rights of intellectual property owners."

The hope is that pilot download schemes, to be launched by the partners, will help fuel creativity activity across Britain, as people utilise the footage in personal projects, classroom presentations and their own artistic creations.

At present the BBC is makng footage from natural history and factual programmes available under the licence, while Channel 4 has commissioned a selection of content.

The BFI will be releasing silent comedy, early literary adaptations, newsreel footage and archive footage of British cities in the early 20th century.

Copyright issues for modern drama and comedy footage have yet to be resolved.

In the latest issue of the Writers' Guild's magazine, UK Writer, Guild General Secretary Bernie Corbett warns writers against using Creative Commons licenses and advises them to hang on to their rights.

BBC unions plan strike ballot

Unions at the BBC are to ballot members for strike action over plans to cut up to 4,000 posts at the corporation.

The decision came after a three-hour meeting between unions and the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson.

Bectu, Amicus and the National Union of Journalists said the BBC had refused to meet their demand that there should be no compulsory redundancies.

More details from BBC News.

Saga writing competition

Arrow Books and ASDA have announced a major national competition to find the next big saga author – a writer who combines superb storytelling, unforgettable characters and a vivid sense of time and place.

The competition will be launched on 4th July 2005 and Rosie Harris’s new novel At Sixes and Sevens will contain details of the competition. At Sixes and Sevens will have featured space in store and be on sale exclusively with ASDA for 2 weeks prior to the official 21st July publication date.

Arrow and ASDA are inviting submissions of 4000 words or roughly 2 chapters, along with a synopsis for the rest of the book and ideas for other novels. The closing date is December 2005 and submissions will be judged by a panel including the editorial team at Arrow, author Rosie Harris and Toby Bourne of ASDA. The winner will be announced in January 2006 and the book will then be published in 2007 by Arrow and available in ASDA stores nationwide. ASDA have committed to support with major space in-store and a feature in ASDA magazine.

For further information please call Charlotte Bush on 020 7840 8613
or email cbush@randomhouse.co.uk

David Greig interviewed

Playwright David Greig (Pyrenees, The American Pilot) interviewed by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian.

Greig now averages around five new plays a year, an astonishing rate. This is partly just good financial planning. "There are very few playwrights I can think of that don't go through a period of being very unfashionable while they're alive," he says, with evident trepidation. But does he wish he could slow down? "I'm always proud of the work," he begins carefully. "I genuinely never let the work be shit, and I always push myself, but I wouldn't write so much if I didn't have to make a living. It's a good discipline, but I would dearly like to work at a slightly slower pace. Although that's partly becoming possible anyway."

Evan Katz on writing 24

Talking to 24 writer and co-executive producer Evan Katz about his hit Fox show, you can't help but feel a bit like the show is real. As he talks, you begin to feel the same gravity pull you in that seems to affect those involved with the show. It's the same intense, suspended disbelief that makes the show a terror-infused, hyper-addictive smash.

An interview for the Writers Guild of America west, by Dylan Callaghan

Amazon buys BookSurge

Last week we reported that online retailer Amazon.com was considering a move into electronic publishing. Now it has bought BookSurge, reports The New York Times, one of America's biggest print-on-demand companies.

Amazon.com declined to share specific details about the acquisition - its second in five years. "We feel we can do great things together. We're just not saying what that might be," said Patty Smith, a company spokeswoman. Nonetheless, Amazon appears a good match for BookSurge's would-be authors, because it attracts perhaps more literary types than any other electronic commerce site.

ITV strike battle continues

Strikers at...ITV will target ratings-winning soap operas "Coronation Street" and "Emmerdale" if management refuses to increase a pay offer following Friday's walk out, union leaders said Friday.

You can get the full story from Reuters.

Saul Bellow tributes

Often described as a writers' writer, Saul Bellow has been praised across the press since his death last week. Of particular interest, I thought were pieces by Christopher Hitchens in The Observer and James Wood in The Guardian.People disagreed about Bellow's final stature, but no one really disagreed with the quality of the prose. Most writers are called "beautiful" at one time or another, as most flowers are called pretty, but there are never very many really great prose writers alive. Bellow was one, to my mind the greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century - and thus one of the greatest in American fiction. It was a prose for all seasons; it seemed to do more of what one wanted from prose than any other competitor. It was intensely lyrical and musical, its rhythms a pressing mingle of Yiddish, American, English, and Hebrew (after Lawrence, Bellow was the most biblical of modern writers in English); but it was also grounded in speech, and seemed incapable of preciousness (unlike, say, the lovely but often pampered lustres of an Updike); it was witty, metaphysical, sensuous, playful. Above all, Bellow saw the world anew. When he looked, say, at icicles hanging from a hospital roof, he saw them resembling the teeth of a large fish, and then saw the "clear drops burning at their tips". Burning! When he described a younger man helping an old man across a street, he noted the "big but light elbow" of the old man. Big but light! There indeed was a writer attending to the world, attending to the body, missing nothing.

Gallagher turns to children's TV drama

Eileen Gallagher, managing director of Shed Productions (Bad Girls, Footballer's Wives) has written her first children's series, reports The Times. The Fugitives is a £1 million conspiracy thriller called The Fugitives for ITV, about a 12-year-old boy who suspects that he is being used by his own father in a cloning experiment.

The Watchmen to leave Pinewood

The producers of The Watchmen, a $120 million blockbuster Hollywood film, are poised to pull the plug on producing the sci-fi epic at Pinewood Studios because of the rising cost of making films in Britain and uncertainty over government tax breaks.
Paramount Pictures, a division of Viacom, the films-to-theme parks conglomerate, is looking for alternative locations for the film after deciding that it will be too expensive to make in Britain. One option under consideration is to move the film back to Hollywood, where it would be cheaper to make.

More in The Times.

Science fiction studies

The University of Liverpool is launching the world's first website dedicated to science fiction research, reports The Guardian.The SF Hubutilises the University's Science Fiction library, the largest of its kind in Europe.

Amazon to become a publisher?

Sources say that over the last few months Amazon has quietly been making the rounds to agents, in search of authors to write short pieces Amazon could post for sale. According to one version of the plan, Amazon would charge $.49 per electronic download for short stories, journalism, essays and other work; the material would be exclusive to Amazon and would not appear in a book or any other form. Material would be in the 2,000-10,000 word range and could include such updates as alternative endings to novels. An audio component could also be in the works; the company is requesting audio rights.

The full story is in Publishers Weekly.

Saul Bellow dies

Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed historian of society whose fictional heroes - and whose scathing, unrelenting and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning - gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century, died yesterday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.

More coverage from the New York Times.

All his work, long and short, was written in a distinctive, immediately recognizable style that blended high and low, colloquial and mandarin, wisecrack and aphorism, as in the introduction of the poet Humboldt at the beginning of "Humboldt's Gift": "He was a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine."

Sony Award nominations

Nominations have been announced for the Sony Awards, the biggest prizes in radio.

Drama award

• Banana Republic - BBC Radio Drama for Radio 4
  
• Laughter In The Dark - dramatised by Craig Higginson from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov (Catherine Bailey Productions for BBC Radio 3)
  
• Stan - by Neil Brand (BBC Radio Drama for Radio 4)
  
• The Grove - by Positive Impact, various writers (In conjunction with Angela Heslop for BBC Radio Merseyside)
  
• The Permanent Way - based on the play by David Hare (Catherine Bailey Productions for BBC Radio 3)
  

Comedy award

• Clare In The Community - by Harry Venning and David Ramsden (BBC Radio Entertainment for Radio 4)
  
• The 99p Challenge - by Kevin Cecil, Andy Riley, Jon Holmes and Tony Roche (Pozzitive Television for BBC Radio 4)
  
• The Complete and Utter History of the Mona Lisa - by Patrick Barlow (Above The Title Productions for BBC Radio 4)
  
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Episode 3 - by Douglas Adams (Above The Title Productions for BBC Radio 4)
  
• The Museum of Everything - by Danny Robins, Dan Tetsell and Marcus Brigstocke (BBC Radio Entertainment for Radio 4)

Sharman is new BBC children's controller

Jane Sharman has been appointed controller of the BBC's children's programming, reports Media Bulletin.

Sharman will take over the running of the BBC's two children's channels, the CBBC channel and CBeebies, from Dorothy Prior who last week moved become controller of production resources.

Sharman takes up her new role on June 20 and will be responsible for all editorial, commissioning and scheduling strategies, as well as overall responsibility for all children's production, children's acquisitions and CBBC

Sharman is currently controller of daytime programming, and does not have any previous experience of children's TV.

Northern Exposure Summer Shorts

The West Yorkshire Playhouse is accepting submissions of extracts from full-length plays in development for Summer Shorts 2005. Five writers will be invited on a ten day residency at West Yorkshire Playhouse and Theatre in the Mill 1 – 10 June during which time their plays will be developed and rehearsed. The 20 minute pieces will then be shown on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 June at Theatre in the Mill.

To be eligible to enter writers must be resident in the BBC Northern Exposure region (the North-West, North-East or Yorkshire and Humberside).

The deadline for submissions is 25 April 2005. Full details are on the West Yorkshire Playhouse website

DVD producers

With DVD takings now outstripping box office receipts, the producers of DVDs occupy are becoming increasingly powerful, says Christian Moerk in the New York Times.

The DVD production community has its own list of hits and misses - just as the feature film community does - which has less to do with the value of a director's original work than with what a producer has later done, or failed to do, to amplify it. "You would be surprised at the material coming out of good places," Mr. Bouzereau [who works on Steven Spielberg's films) said, politely referring to the copious amount of lesser DVD material being released.

How well does TV and film tackle disease?

An interesting article by Nick Triggle on BBC News about the way in which TV and film tends to portray illness.

The way Coronation Street handled the death of Alma Sedgewick in 2002 was typical of the way cancer is treated by scriptwriters, Cancer Research UK said.

The character, played by Amanda Barrie, died within a few months of being diagnosed and without contracting any of the symptoms.

"It happened too quickly," said Julia Frater, a cancer information nurse at the charity.

She said the problem was that writers almost always tried to fit the disease round the plot, rather than the plot round the disease.

"This does not really help us or people with cancer. I think if more effort was put in, drama could both entertain and inform."

Stuart Murphy interveiwed

BBC3 boss Stuart Murphy talks to Liz Thomas in The Stage.

“We are developing our drama strategy,” he explains. “We started out with half-hour impact dramas such as Burn It, before moving on to hour-long shows with greater character development like Bodies and Conviction. Now we want to bring more warmth to our drama, appealing to a wider audience. There will always be a real focus on new talent because I believe the more people bringing on new work the more interesting television will be. Casanova had a real attitude and is an example of the channel at its best.”

Teddington studios saved

Pinewood Shepperton have bought Teddington Studios for £2.6 million, reports Reuters.

Teddington, founded in 1912, had gone into administration last week after losing some key contracts.