Getting Beyond The Routine

With the Screenwriters’ Festival 2008 over, I was reading Paul Hoggart’s piece on the Broadcast website about Barbara Machin’s opening address on the Tuesday morning. The creator of Waking the Dead and writer of the recent Kiss of Death, which played with narrative as it shifted back and forth in time, telling the story from the point of view of the main characters, Machin’s impassioned plea was for less formulaic and more innovative television drama.

As Hoggart writes:

Her view is that in an ultra-cautious ratings-driven climate it is getting harder and harder to pitch unusual ideas. “I’ve talked to so many of my contemporaries in the past three weeks, and they all feel the same.” Her complaints echo the regular grumblings of critics and commentators dismayed by “safe” formulaic drama, or tired viewers who complain that their weeknight primetime schedules are cluttered with reality and lifestyle shows, long-running serials and samey generic drama.

Obviously that was going to get the audience’s vote, and Hoggart reports that her speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause. But, homefield advantage aside, is there really a “chilly climate” for innovative drama? Hoggart asks the opinion of Jane Tranter, Head of BBC Fiction, who, with a budget of £250 million, commissions all television drama across the four BBC channels.

[Y]ou might expect Jane Tranter (another speaker at the festival) to bristle at the critique - and her impatience is clear when we speak. She cites a string of recent BBC productions which have added something new to drama: broadcasting Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House in soap-opera length episodes, echoing the author’s original part-work publication; the cultural time-shifts involved in the concept of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes; the rejuvenation of Doctor Who; the structure and scheduling of Five Days last year, and Criminal Justice this week.

While that’s a good response and the award-winning Bleak House was a spectacular piece of drama, here’s the thing... it’s THREE FUCKING YEARS OLD! And that’s from the transmission date, so if you take it from the time it was commissioned, well, that makes it even older. Doctor Who is over three years old since it debuted and Life on Mars over two years old, and we don’t even want to go into how long that took to get on the screen.

I’ve read this obviously well-rehearsed, default answer for a while now, as it has bobbed up in the press, so much so that it could almost be accused of being a broken record. One thing I’ve learnt from working at animation studios and production companies and even back during the dark days at The Esteemed School of Art is: Resting on your laurels is a very, very dangerous thing to do.