When I worked on Emmerdale I expected jolly japes. Actually, it was a bloodbath

Telegraph

2 days ago

When I first entered television, I thought it would be a jolly affair. So did everybody I knew (who didn't work in television). That must be fun, people would say. And yes, it could be fun, and rewarding, and the money was very nice. But I soon discovered that there was another factor to the thing.
On some shows, backstage was a bloodbath. Jockeyings for position; stabbings in the back, the front and the sides; plotting and whispering in dark corners, and sudden palace coups. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that Emmerdale – on which I was script editor from 1998-99 – had something of the flavour of the Borgias to it. It was a commonly expressed observation in the office that the production process was much more captivatingly dramatic than what ended up on screen.
There always seemed to be a panic, particularly on bread-and-butter long-runners such as soaps and serial dramas, a hysteria in the air that everything was falling apart. It was all taken incredibly seriously. I still have the occasional nightmare, decades later.
An anthropology student would find much worthy material in television studios. I started to realise that any human institution – however trivial its raison d'être – can turn into a Tudor court. In fact, the lighter and frothier shows tended to be the worst culprits. On Brookside, for example, there was a long-standing tradition of a meeting where all the writers were gathered to tear each other's first-draft scripts to shreds in a display of macho gorilla-style breast-beating. Some of the long-established silverback writers on Coronation Street would stomp furiously out of meetings – but always left their bag behind, so they could return to collect it and be persuaded to stay. This camp spectacle was regarded as Just One Of Those Things.
Victoria Wood perfectly captured the threadbare, frantic atmosphere of soaps in her celebrated 1987 sketch depicting The Making of Acorn Antiques; firings, flubs, overindulged actors, everyone's nerves on a knife edge ('don't talk to the press if you like having kneecaps').
I soon realised that the less serious the public reputation of a show, the more serious the people making it are. If anything, less-watched shows were even worse; the lower the ratings, the higher the angst, the more poring over irrelevant details. Folderols are often the most fraught productions. Backstage gossip abounds in television, and you'll hear hilarious titbits: 'It's like Robespierre's reign of terror on Hollyoaks', or 'There's been another night of the long knives on Peak Practice', or 'Cruising with Jane McDonald has descended into a frenzied orgy of bloodletting'.
I mean, obviously, it's good that people care about the quality of their work. But it can be very funny when you hear something that is flagrantly ludicrous, and you get a dizzying moment of clarity. I remember pressing a writer for delivery of a late storyline on Emmerdale, and his totally straight reply, 'I'll do my best, but I've got some really heavy rewrites on Sooty.'
Worse, your own mind starts to turn as you're absorbed into it. You get a TV brain and a TV-sized imagination. You find yourself thinking peculiar thoughts, speaking industry jargon like an Apprentice contestant. You hear yourself say something like 'we need to incentivise the brand to generate content'.
Your mind starts to obsess over time, money and achievability. I was once reading a book and started thinking automatically how to make it cheaper; oh, we could use the same location for those two houses, let's combine those characters, etc.
Over the years, these complications and their attendant traumas started spreading, affecting all kinds of TV. As the medium became more filmic, the edgy, overwrought nature of filmmaking – with its frenetic rewriting – swallowed television up, too.
The irony is that a first-draft TV script takes a month to write, but that the final version is often rushed in 36 hours by somebody else entirely, often among tears and traumas. And why? Often there is no appreciable difference in quality, it's just a bit different.
There is a strange compulsion to complicate an already complicated process; the difference between doing a good professional job, and obsessing. An understandable fear of lapsing into laziness and complacency can morph into paranoia. Execs often just get bored of the lines in a script they've read 50 drafts of, and mistake that for it not being good enough.
American TV was always like this. But the old British method was very light-touch. A producer colleague who'd worked at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s told me that in those days, the attitude to writers was, 'If they haven't got it after two drafts, pay them off and say thank you.' Occasionally, I felt an echo of these prelapsarian times, of long, liquid lunches and people keeping their perspective. But that was already on its way out in the 1990s when I was coming in.
Now? Endless drafts. Endless angst, endless meetings. A friend worked on an Amazon Prime show and finally chucked it in when she reached – and I'm not kidding you – draft 110.
Oodles of sturm and lashings of drang, and for what? The viewers don't appreciate it. Television should be fun to watch and to make. Cut the complications.