Breaking the Screenplay

“Fuck everything!”

That was me in 2016 (see also 2017-present day). I had just come out of something called the “BBC Development Process”, which involves taking a good idea and progressively, over a period that an oak tree would consider lengthy, turning it into a succession of ever-worsening scripts until something which any sane person would regard as an abject piece of shit is deemed worthy of being shown to a commissioner. Said commissioner will then reject said piece of shit with an excuse along the lines of “We have several similar pieces of shit in development, the stinkiest of which is being scribbled by [insert name of wildly over-rated and over-employed writer], so that’s the one we are going to make”.

BBC development is a low-paid, demoralising experience that we are all supposed to be terribly grateful to participate in.

Fuck everything.

But, as with most periods of frustration and despair, epiphany lurked just around the corner…

I picked myself up and decided to write something on spec (meaning no one knew about it, wanted it, or was paying for it). It was a secret agent show, referencing the shows I’d loved watching as a kid (shows that were already old then); The Prisoner, The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. etc. Given that it was an off-centre story/genre that was vanishingly unlikely to ever get a greenlight in the UK, and given that I was beholden to no one on the project, I thought I’d experiment with the form a little.