Holby City was nominated for a BAFTA TV Award in March, rounding off a golden, 12 month period which has seen some high profile, critically acclaimed storylines and several great new characters introduced - including Jemma Redgrave as the feisty Bernie Wolfe.
So BBC Writersoom paid a visit to the UK’s most famous fictional hospital to find out how the plot lines keep on coming. We caught up with Holby City’s Story Editor, Luke Woellhaf, who told us about the reality of his job on the show - from supporting writers to dealing with daunting ‘blank squares’ and panic on the wards…
It’s hard to describe a ‘typical’ day in the Holby City story office. Like many others in both editorial and production, my job feels like an amalgamation of several. One day I’ll be mapping a chunk of episodes with the rest of story team, a process whereby we look at a big blank whiteboard with dread, drink a lot of tea, complain about the lack of working board markers, drink some more tea, and hopefully think of some stories to fill in those daunting blank squares we’ll later call ‘episodes’.
Luckily, to help us along, we’ll all have spent at least two days prior at one of our quarterly story conferences, which is basically a jumble of producers, script editors, researchers and writers shouting out possible storylines, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous – often both. We collate the stories, mould them into solid, structured beats with hooks, cliffs and other jagged-edged buzzwords, and then we’ll likely spend a day (or five) writing them up into a document for all to read and rightly pull to pieces.
Once we’re happy, we commission a writer in our ingeniously named ‘commissioning meetings’. In this meeting I’ll be expected to answer a multitude of questions about character, tone, continuity, where a story has been before, and where it’s going. And once the writer and script team are happy, we send them off and put our feet up because the story team’s job is done. And then we all ride around on flying pigs… If only! No, once we commission one ep, we’re usually already looking ahead to the next one, or the next twenty – in fact, we’re mapping stories that we might not see realised for a whole year after we’ve thought of them, stories that will change and evolve as time goes on so that the finished product is the best possible outcome, with everybody’s fingerprints on it.
And then of course there are the many day-to-day responsibilities; first draft meetings, editorial meetings, cast meetings, medical meetings, design meetings – lots of meetings with lots of people. And hopefully lots of tea. To give you just one example, a first draft meeting is where the editorial team, spearheaded by our fantastic (honestly, he is – it’s almost annoying) Series Producer Simon Harper, sit down and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of an episode. But it’s not just a slanging match - most importantly, we talk about how we can support the writer moving forward, to write the best episode that they want to write.
But then there are the meetings you can’t plan. I might be called into a room with a panic-stricken producer and director, a week before shooting, to discuss changing an entire story (usually followed by a meeting with some panic-stricken cast members who understandably hate us for changing all their lines an hour before they shoot a scene).
Or I might have to discuss the episode arc of a brand new character with the casting department and our Series Producer, a discussion that could entail everything from backstory and personality quirks, to favourite food and mother’s maiden names – things you might never see, but we actually do need to know (honest!). Or of course (and this is rare) I might be forced to take an awkwardly posed photo with a far too kind cast member, whose ease in front of the camera makes me all the more certain I should stay firmly behind the scenes, in a story room with scarily large whiteboards and stacks of empty tea cups. So it really is hard to tell you what a typical day in the Holby story department might be like, except that it’s far from typical.
Big thanks to Luke! Need more Holby City? You’ll find exclusive videos, character profiles and much more on the show’s official site!
