Blog posts by year and monthMarch 2009
Posts (10)
Writers Academy 10
My Writing Heart Applications for the course open next Monday 6th April. Do keep your eye on this website for details of when the online application goes live. To give your another flavour of what the course is like, I thought we'd hear from another recent graduate. Gill Adams completed...
College of Comedy
Just a quickie to say that the BBC College of Comedy 2009 is now accepting applications. The college is the Comedy equivalent of the BBC Drama Writers Academy and is run by Micheál Jacob, who has been known to post a blog or two about it here. I'm sure he'll be around shortly to say more ...
The Wire
For those that haven't yet seen it, The Wire is coming to BBC2 tonight at 11:20pm. (Not the Radio 3 series, for those who were wondering. This is the American drama series set in Baltimore.) Series creator David Simon came from a journalistic background originally. There's an excellent int...
New Look
If you're reading this entry on the website (and not via, say, an RSS reader, or telepathy) then you'll notice that we've got a new look for the blog. This is part of a redesign to help the BBC's blogs be consistent with the rest of the site, and easier to use. You can find out more about...
The Perfect 10: 9. Passion
And here's instalment 9: Passion It's not an easy thing to explain, but one of the most important things we are looking for is that true, unquenchable desire in the writer to tell their story. You can tell very quickly when the writer really means it - and you can tell just as easily when ...
It is big, and it is clever.
Television's James Moran has done a Monster Writing FAQ for us all. By which I mean it's big and comprehensive, not that it has sharp teeth or tentacles or whatnot. It covers all you need to know about how to break into writing, including The Big Secret. He's managed to get it down to four wo...
The Perfect 10: 8. Exposition and Expression
Apologies for the late arrival of the next instalment, it's been extremely busy here... But here's number 8: Exposition and Expression Or in other words: dialogue. In truth, i think it's almost impossible to teach or learn how to have an ear for characters and their voices. It's perfectly ...
And now the end is near...
In a rare quiet moment, I'm taking the opportunity to apologise for my lack of blogging, and to say that tonight marks the end of the first year of the College of Comedy. We're doing a live showcase here at Television Centre, we're expecting 130 people from the comedy world inside and outside t...
Writers Academy 9
Where are they now? The Writers Academy has been going for four years now. 32 writers have done the course, and I thought it might be useful to look at what's happened to them.... Academy writers have joined the core writing teams of all four shows... five at Casualty (including one, Mark...
Writers Academy 8
"Those Shows" I was at a meeting the other day to talk about writer training (at an institution outside the BBC). I was talking about why new writers sometimes failed when writing for the shows I worked for. I suggested that it might be because they didn't like them or even watch them when ...
