Editor's Note: Mark Brotherhood is the writer of CBBC series Worst Year of My Life ... Again! which was commissioned following a BBC Writersroom Script Room. This year's Script Room for Children's TV and Comedy opens on 23rd June and closes on 7th July.
Worst Year Of My Life ... Again! was born out of an open call for children’s drama scripts through the BBC Writersroom website back in… *quickly googles*… July 2009?! Blimey.
I’d submitted a few scripts to BBC Writersroom before and was always very lucky to get nice feedback from them but this was the first direct call I’d responded to. It’s hard to get a foot in the writing door if you have no industry background or contacts so BBC Writersroom was one of the few potential entry points open to me back then… I hadn’t been on their website for some time and when I finally noticed the open-call it was just two days before the deadline! It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up though, so I tried not to let the fact I had to come up with an idea and write a script in 48 hours put me off…
I immediately stuck the lead on my dog and went out for a long walk, thinking about what would have appealed to me back when I was in my early teens… It struck me that when I was that age I would often have days where I ended up mortified with embarrassment over some stupid thing I’d said or done and would wish I had a reset button so I could do it over. From there it was just a short jump to “What if that happened to the main character? … But instead of just isolated incidents, it was an entire year’s worth of humiliation? … And then what if he woke up and discovered the whole twelve months had reset itself and he was going to live through it all a second time? Would that be a good or a bad thing? He could stop the embarrassing things from happening, but he’d also have to deal with the butterfly effect of changing history on a daily basis”
So that dog walk ended up being the genesis of what became Worst Year. I got home and started writing it straight away and managed to complete and send off the pilot script just before the deadline. To my amazement the script (then called ‘Take Two’) was amongst eight selected to be taken forward and I was invited to a attend a BBC Writersroom retreat out in Kent where myself and the other applicants got to develop and work on our ideas with various representatives from the BBC Writersroom and CBBC. To my further amazement my script was one of two that were then taken on to be developed by CBBC. (The other one, incidentally, was Debbie Moon’s brilliant Wolfblood).
I worked with Sarah Muller, Simon Nelson and Connal Orton at CBBC to produce an alternative pilot script to sell to the commissioners. Connal became the British Executive Producer of the show and came up with the more memorable title of “Worst Year Of My Life ... Again!” – he also helped me completely restructure the format into the one that we eventually used in every episode. The show wasn’t immediately commissioned but I was very lucky in that Sarah, Simon and Connal not only continued to champion it but also got me work on other CBBC shows whilst we waited. Eventually (and to be honest I don’t know how it came about!) I was informed the show was going to be made but would be a co-production between CBBC and ACTF in Australia and in order for that to go ahead the series would need to be filmed out there…
…So, bizarrely, I ended up being flown out to Australia where I spent a fortnight story-lining the entire series with the ACTF. The change of location didn’t bother me at all, I don’t think teenage things are exactly country specific – an embarrassing incident there is no different to an embarrassing incident here – and apart from a few pop-culture-references nothing really changed. Plus I was hugely excited by the fact the Australian Exec, Bernadette O’Mahony, had produced the peerless ‘Round The Twist’ – possibly the greatest children’s show ever made!
And that was basically it… A year later it was being filmed… and now, another year later, it’s about to get its UK premiere. And I couldn’t be happier. In the intervening five years since that original open call I ended up writing for Shameless, Hollyoaks, Mount Pleasant, 4 O’Clock Club, Young Dracula and am currently working on Death In Paradise. All of which, in one way or another, came about because of sending that entry in… Which is a frankly terrifying thought now that I type it! “Worst Year Of My Life ... Again!” is all about fate and destiny and those little moments in your life that can change everything… I have genuinely no idea where I’d be now or what I’d be doing if I hadn’t spotted that opportunity just two days before it was about to close… Or indeed if I hadn’t had a dog that needed a walk … In fact I think I might take her out for another one now and see what happens…
