As a special Christmas treat for you - we've put together a selection box of scripts from our favourite Christmas episodes of BBC continuing dramas over the past few years.
Download them using the links below. Enjoy!
EastEnders
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Christmas Day 2009 part 1 & 2 by Simon Ashdown
Christmas Day 2007 - part 1 by Simon Ashdown
Christmas Day 2007 - part 2 by Simon Ashdown
Holby City
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"Snow Queens", Series 13, Episode 11 by Martha Hillier (Christmas 2010)
Casualty
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"Winter Wonderland", Series 25, Episode 17 by Daisy Coulam (Christmas 2010)
Keep an eye on the BBC writersroom website for lots of exciting new opportunities and competitions in 2012.
Just wanted to let you know that the writersroom blog is going to be going to be going through some changes in the next week.
We'll be moving over to the new pan-BBC iSite system - which all current BBC blogs will be moving over to within the next few months. In design terms, iSite blogs will follow GEL - the BBC's new global experience language for its digital services, giving a unified look and feel across all blogs and websites on bbc.co.uk. Read more about GEL.
From your perspective as a user - blog comments will work in exactly the same way, they'll just be using the new comments system which you can view on this page. You will now be able to rate other users' comments and change the order in which comments appear according to ratings, newest added and latest added.
Publishing content to the blog will be exactly the same for us - except that the current blog index page you arrive at - instead of seeing the latest three full length blog posts as you currently do, you will see 1200 character summaries from the latest three posts, and 600 character summaries for the previous seven, and you will of course be able to click through to read the full posts. We'll also be replacing 'categories' with 'tags' - these tags will be consistent on all blogs across the BBC.
It'll take a few days for the changes to be visible on the blog as we migrate all the content over - in the mean time, you'll still be able to browse the blog in exactly the same way.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to comment here on the blog, or on Twitter to @bbcwritersroom
**UPDATE** 15/12/2011
Unfortunately due to an unforeseen issue, the move over to the new blog platform has been delayed until the New Year.
I had written about kids before (most notably in Kid in the Corner) but never before given them the central driving narrative. What was also new to me was the notion of writing 'for' kids as opposed to writing about them. To be honest, this was a distinction I was never entirely comfortable with (it might even have been a distinction i put in my own head) save for making sure that you didn't put unlikely words in the mouths of 13/14 year olds or have them over expressing their thoughts.
Ultimately the rule of thumb of good writing is authenticity and portraying the kids as accurately as possible in the way the spoke to each other. Needless to say, a 50 year old man writing London patois for teenagers needed a bit of help - and the young cast refined and improved my 'ear'. I realized that writing 'for' and 'about' kids is the same thing. The audience will overwhelmingly be children but again i didn't want to make 'allowances' for them i.e. animation or aliens - just rely on good storytelling and hope that would command keep their attention.
POSTCODE is ostensibly an ensemble piece about young Londoners living parallel lives in the same area ( Middle class independent-school-going kids living in Victorian villas, contrasted with the lives of kids on the nbeighbouring council estate). Ultimately however, it's the story of an unlikely friendship between a 'posh un' and a 14 year old son of a Somali asylum-seeking family. This friendship had to be funny, tricky and true. While I wanted to explore themes of class and cultural segregation, poverty and opportunity, it couldn't feel preachy. that's a turn off for anyone - adults or children.
I was attracted to the idea of writing a 'children's drama' simply because I had a son who was 13 at the time and whose default viewing was the Inbetweeners and Waterloo Road. Beyond comedy or soap, there semed to be very little in the way of drama for and about a generation easily overlooked-too old for Tracy Beaker , too young to watch SKINS and find it anything other than aspirational rather than biographical.
Post riots, a drama exploring the disparate lives of young City dwellers making connections across the 'divide' should hopefully be heartening viewing for anyone.
BAFTA-winning screenwriter, Tony Marchant has written the brand new CBBC drama, Postcode.
Watch the first episode of Postcode today on CBBC at 17.45.
