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From Issue 2: The Absence of Risk: By Peter Ansorge Peter Ansorge’s benchmark From Liverpool to Los Angeles book traced the evolution of scriptwriting in Britain from its glory days in Liverpool to the apparent success of our leading writers and directors in Los Angeles. These extracts are from his article in which he looks at the important developments in scriptwriting over the last five years. As Channel 4's Head of Drama from 1987 to 1997, I had always given the highest priority to drama which is now described as 'the signature piece'. Our television drama is unique in having developed a tradition of writer-led projects that began with Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play in the 1960s, continued at the BBC in the 70s and 80s with work such as The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness and Boys From The Blackstuff, and which Channel 4 went on to champion in the 90s with A Very British Coup, Traffik, GBH and The Politician's Wife. Writers like Alan Bleasdale, Paula Milne and David Hare were coming into my office with horror stories about what was happening elsewhere in television. Executives were becoming impatient with author-led drama. It failed too often and its cost was becoming increasingly hard to justify. It had been decided that the channel controllers would take over the reins of commissioning drama. They would come up with the best new ideas in close consultation with their rapidly expanding marketing departments. Writers would be told what was needed for individual slots. The new focus was to be on the kind of long-running series at which the US networks excelled. Writers would have to swallow their pride and begin to adopt the team-writing techniques of their US counterparts. It was a moment when broadcasters decided to cut back on the expensive mini-series and single plays which had been the flagships of our television drama. At the same time writers and directors were being given an unprecedented opportunity to work on feature films. I argued that the success of Film On 4, together with the growth of independent production companies, had created entirely new and somewhat unreal expectations for the industry. Directors like Stephen Frears, Mike Newell, Mick Jackson, Jon Amiel and Michael Apted had once earned their spurs in television. Now they were all working in Los Angeles. The success of My Beautiful Laundrette, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting, Secrets And Lies and The Full Monty proved, so it was claimed, that there was now a viable market for low-budget British films in America. Lottery funding was also in the pipeline. The prospect of a career in Hollywood suddenly appeared to open up to a generation of writers and directors. Could we be as successful in creating long-running series as the Americans? Did we really have the base for consistent success at the international box-office? Above all were we about to throw out the baby with the bathwater by actually disempowering writers? David Mercer, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, Troy Kennedy Martin and Paula Milne had once been at the heart of the creative process in television drama. Would the new order allow the next generation equal freedom and opportunity? Was the journey from Liverpool to Los Angeles in fact worth taking? At Channel 4 Michael Jackson greenlit a string of youth-oriented, life-style dramas: A Young Person's Guide to Being a Rock Star, Psychos, Teachers and, most successfully, Queer as Folk which was a no-holds-barred look at the Manchester gay scene and provided genuine shocks and revelations for young viewers. Interestingly, the format rather than the show itself was subsequently sold to the States. For all these series were commissioned as potential 'franchises', British bids to compete with American brands of comedy and drama. The action in Psychos and Teachers is often interrupted by fantasy sequences borrowed from Thirty Something, Sex and the City and Ally McBeal. The lighting is invariably bright, the camera swirls round the action and the style is self-consciously upbeat. Teachers, for instance, has nothing to do with everyday life in the state school where it is set. The entire focus is on the sex lives, hard drinking and adolescent behaviour of its unrepresentative young teachers. While pleasing marketing departments, there is a pitfall in designing drama that only appeals to one section of the audience. All of these series, aimed at the 'aspirational' young, struggled to gain two million viewers, the majority falling well below that figure. Even for Channel 4, with its remit to cater for minorities, these figures are disappointing. Low audiences for Attachments, Tony Garnett's dot-com follow up to This Life shown on BBC2 in 2001, underlined the problem. Targeting one specific age-group can narrow the constituency for television drama. ITV - at present a rather cannier commissioner of drama than either the BBC or C4 - did not make the same mistake with Cold Feet. Here the Thirty Something life-style formula was transposed to a trio of married couples in Manchester today. In Cold Feet young couples mixed with the middle-aged, the upwardly-mobile clashed with the working-class and, as a consequence, the drama had a wide appeal. Even so, British life-style dramas come across as more contrived than their American counterparts. The actors tend to be cast from the same post-This Life talent pool. The storylines are devised by the producer and script editors, as is the case with our soap operas, and then handed on to the writing team. They are often yawningly predictable; the borrowings from American series seem imposed and even cynical.CONT. in Issue 2. © Peter Ansorge 2002
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