From Issue 11, July 2003:

Running The Show

UK showrunners interviewed by Jane Marlow

Ann McManus of Shed Productions sums up the concept of showrunning most succinctly. According to her, it’s about being responsible for ‘what goes in at the beginning of the process as well as what comes out at the end’. McManus and Shed co-owner, Maureen Chadwick, are the creative team behind ITV’s Bad Girls and Footballers’ Wives, and they describe themselves as ‘showrunners in the American style’.

McManus continues: ‘You create the characters and the situation – whether from your own original idea or from someone else’s [as in Footballers’ Wives]. You write the storylines. You establish a writing style in the first couple of scripts, then you commission others to write individual scripts and you edit those scripts so that there is consistency along the way.’

BBC controller of continuing series and former Brookside producer, Mal Young puts Mersey TV founder, Phil Redmond’s name forward as one of the first people to ‘showrun’ drama in the UK. ‘Phil Redmond’s a showrunner because he’s the lead creative [on a show] but he’s also the manager of the company,’ says Young. ‘In this country, because television is based on the theatre and radio, it’s much more about the authored voice; the Shakespeare and Dickens who would sit in their garret and churn out six hours of television and give it to the BBC or ITV, and it would all be very reverential. So we’ve never really empowered writers to become showrunners. We tend to say, you’re writers and they are the producers and the two should never really mix.’

However, the production process of the BBC’s police drama, Merseybeat, has seen the writer and co-creator of the series, Chris Murray, adopt the role of showrunner. Murray devised the series with Young, who was keen to create an environment that would give the show an ‘authored’ feel. ‘It was evident very quickly that Chris wanted to make sure that the stuff we wrote got onto the screen and didn’t go to a freelance producer who would then say: “I know you wrote it like this but we’re going to cast it like this and change it”.’ To avoid this outcome, Young offered Murray a deal whereby he was guaranteed a certain number of scripts to write and was given an executive producer fee, which meant it became feasible for him to forego other jobs and focus his attention on Merseybeat.

‘It’s a risk for a writer,’ says Young, ‘but it’s good money – guaranteed – and creatively it’s very rewarding. He attends castings, interviews directors and signs off the edit before it comes to me and it makes for a better show.’

For someone like the Hewland International’s Jane Hewland, who comes from a factual programming background at LWT, relinquishing creative control of an idea was never a possibility. ‘Dream Team was the first drama I did,’ she says. ‘I’ve never worked for anyone else who did drama so I didn’t know officially how it was done. We evolved our own system, which, they say, is like the way it’s done in the States.’

She explains that in factual programmes, the person who has the idea goes on to produce the resulting programme, which means the producer is in the thick of the creative action rather than being a manager or organiser. ‘I thought it was my job to come up with ideas and my job to either write or co-write them,’ she adds. ‘Then I would bring in other people – colleagues of mine from all kinds of different disciplines – and get the script together in that manner.’

Elisabeth Murdoch, then BskyB manager of Sky Networks, was the first to take a chance on the novice drama producer and commissioned a 64 x 30-minute series of the Hewland drama Dream Team for Sky One.

‘I didn’t have to write a script to get commissioned by Elisabeth Murdoch because she liked the idea,’ remembers Hewland. She believes that if the idea is strong enough, the scripts can be ‘got right’ and uses the example of the struggling ITV soap Night & Day to illustrate her point. ‘It was a very nice first script but what was the idea?’ she asks. ‘To value the script above the idea seems crazy. You have to ask what’s the USP? What’s making me watch this? Then you look for the quality of the writing after that.’

As creative head of productions like Dream Team and Mile High, Hewland says that hiring writers through agents doesn’t work very well. ‘I want my writers to be like a journalist on a factual programme,’ she comments. ‘I pay their wages and they’re paid a salary to write a show. I also need people who know the show. If you’re on the outside coming in to write maybe one episode, the odds are stacked against you from the beginning.’

At Shed, McManus says that one of the best things about the way they work is the depth of talent at the core of the company. ‘We rely on each other for the creative input,’ she comments, referring to former Coronation Street producer Brian Park, who executive produces Shed’s drama, and managing director Eileen Gallagher, who is co-creator of Bad Girls.

Cont. in Issue 11