Sparks are ten powerful, authentic monologues available now on BBC iPlayer from emerging UK talent, bringing a distinct and alternative view of what it means to be young today. Kaamil Shah wrote the episode Shahid's First Shave and got his first broadcast writing break with our Asian Network shorts back in 2018.
Being a part of a big British-Asian family, you’re surrounded by characters of as many types as you can name, so a career creating characters was a natural choice for me! My screenwriting journey properly began in the spring of 2018 when a scheme popped up on the BBC Writersroom website that I just knew I had to apply for. In collaboration with the BBC Asian Network, BBC Writersroom were commissioning a series of one-minute monologues on British-Asian themes. I was juggling a Screenwriting course, a part-time teaching job and a bartending job at the time - my work has always centred around the British-Pakistani and Indian communities I belong to, so the opportunity to create something with great collaborators like these two was one I couldn’t pass up.
I was over the moon when I was invited to a weekend workshop in Birmingham to develop a short piece I’d written about a wannabe entrepreneur called Moheez. The only problem? I’m a Londoner, and I had a full weekend’s worth of bar shifts that very weekend. I’ll never forget driving back and forth to Birmingham only a couple of hours after cashing up. Even though I was dog-tired, the whole team there were great, and I loved how my idea took shape over the course of the weekend to where it finally got commissioned. A few months later and Moheez Means Business became my first credit and was shown online and on big screens at Asian Network Live – definitely worth those car journeys and sleepless nights!
Having had such a great time working on the piece, I was super happy when Usman Mullan, from the team at BBC Writersroom, kept in touch, inviting me to a workshop pitching sketches for CBBC’s Class Dismissed later in the year. It was my first experience producing work for younger audiences, and this proved invaluable when later, in the Winter of 2019, Usman got in touch once again with an offer to pitch for another monologue, this time for a teenage audience.
I’m not gonna lie, I scratched my head a bit when the brief came in. My school days were far enough behind me to have forgotten most of what it was like to be a teenager. But, talking to my younger cousins and remembering what I went through in my own time, I had an idea for a story about what is a rite of passage for many brown teenagers, your first shave! Shaving for the first time is daunting for anyone and your style of beard can define a lot about who you are a person. But anyone can relate to feeling awkward about growing up and finding their own identity. I knew I was onto something with Shahid’s First Shave, a 9-minute comedy piece that was commissioned as part of the project.
I worked with Usman to develop the pitch into a full-length script from early 2020, with a view to shoot in May of that year. We were halfway through the third draft when... like so many other 2020 stories, Covid got in the way. With everyone’s lives turned upside down by the pandemic, I understood when Shahid’s First Shave was put on hold, although I must admit, I was a little worried we’d never see it come to life after that.
The months of lockdown dragged on until, as things started to open up a little, I finally got news that our little monologue could go back into production. It’s never easy getting back into the rhythm of writing on a script you’ve left behind for a little while, and I was working with a new Script Editor, Luke Frost from BBC Children’s, which meant that I had an almost entirely new set of notes. Add to that, we only had a few weeks to get the script perfect before it went off to the production team and we had to consider what can and can’t be done filming in the midst of a pandemic. Luckily, Luke was great and loved the idea behind the monologue, so we worked really hard, often with multiple drafts and zoom calls a week, to get the script to the best place it could be. Some of the notes were inevitably challenging, but when everyone gets the spirit and tone of what you’re trying to write they invariably make the script better, and I truly believe we delivered the best version of the script when it went into production.
From that point on, the writer’s job is mostly done! I did get the chance to talk the director, the wonderful and talented Raisah Ahmed, through the script, as well as watching a table read with our great actors over Zoom. In a way, I was glad I didn’t have the unenviable job of working out how to shoot our script with social distancing regulations in place. Somehow, they managed it, and seeing it come to life this November on BBC iPlayer was truly joyous! In many ways, it was better than the vision I’d had pre-pandemic, so I was extremely impressed by the whole team behind it.
It’s been a great journey since that first monologue commission with BBC Writersroom, as since then I’ve been privileged enough to secure a wonderful Agent, have three original TV shows go into development with top production companies and worked on numerous schemes such as Channel 4’s Ackley Bridge Shadow Script scheme and the Series Mania Writer’s Campus in France. I’ve been extremely lucky with my collaborators too, particularly at the BBC Writersroom and cannot wait for more of my work to get out there!
Watch all 10 Sparks on BBC iPlayer
Watch Shahid's First Shave on BBC iPlayer
