Agent Provocateur

Spent sometime this weekend thinking about training because of the upcoming Screenwriters’ Festival at Cheltenham and all the publicity about the television festival in Edinburgh especially the Murdoch attack on the BBC and the belief that profit is the main motivator of good telly in a free society.

Well, I didn’t actually hear the speech but it was a big promo for SKY, who thankfully (and belatedly) are doing drama, so let’s be grateful for small mercies. I guess the big battleground is about news not drama (though I do hope SKY’s drama makes profits so they will do more). For screenwriters and those who work with them, however, declining budgets and fragmenting audiences means write smart.

The demise of Big Brother is leading C4 into increasing its drama budget overall, an excellent thing when you look at some of the brilliant drama they are doing. I wonder how much money they made from Slumdog Millionaire? Probably not as much as they deserved.

Back to training: Skillset has undoubtedly focussed many good minds on training and I believe that it is getting better than it was say five years ago. What remains unresolved is the vocational nature of scriptwriting. It is simply not like writing novels.

When you look at the stats (take the Rogers’ Report, which found that over a couple of years the average identity of those who write British films is white, male, over 50 and having had no formal training to write), it makes you think.

When we set up the MA in Television ScriptWriting at De Montfort University in Leicester a number of years ago, one aspect we all agreed on (there were aspects on which the academics at DMU did not agree with those of us from the industry who designed the course) was the intensity of contact with the industry: apart from the opening and closing weeks we wanted industry speakers every week. We paid the speakers well so that every year out of some 24 terms days a year (the third term was not on campus) there were about 20 top industry visitors, ie 40 over the two years.

Even this we felt was not enough but I believe it is the highest in the country. Bournemouth makes the undergrads do six weeks work experience in the industry at the end of their second year, which is an important experience for them. Many of those students spend their time at my agency. Bournemouth has also had the recent addition of the very smart Craig Batty as a senior lecturer in scriptwriting: his book (with Zara Waldeback) is an excellent introduction to screenwriting.

My conclusion from all this is that actually working in the industry in almost any capacity might be as good – better for some, not for all – than doing a degree. In other words learning to write is done by doing it as much as studying it. It requires participation in an industrial process and working under pressure, different from the somewhat laid-back life of most degree courses.

I have come round to favour a combination of gap-year thinking – get your hands dirty and work in the business; if that goes well then get your employer to fund a part-time MA in scriptwriting. Would Skillset provide bursaries to help those companies losing a staff member for a day while they studied for the industry they were working in?

It could be the fast-track to industry-savvy, script-literate professional writers who know what the industry wants and don’t have to guess. In the meantime, where can you get an exceptionally prescient insight into the film and television industry in four days, more information than you can possibly take in, more contacts with the industry than you will make in any year of your life outside of Cheltenham? The Screenwriters’ Festival is worth a year at any higher educational institution. And which university always takes the largest number of students to Cheltenham? De Montfort.