CBBC Q and A 3

What was it like adapting The Story of Tracy Beaker?

Elly: It was interesting doing the adaptation, because the development woman at the time handed me the book and just said "What would you do with that?" So I took it away and read it. I didn't know it. And it was just great. Jacqueline Wilson's a great writer. It's a stream of consciousness. There aren't really chapters and it dives around all over the place and there are sort of fantasy bits in it as well.

But in amongst that, Nick Sharratt does all Jacqueline Wilson's illustrations. And we were going to do animation within the live action as well because there were things you just couldn't show in live action terms. And so I said well we must use Nick's work. We'll animate that. Because then that really ties it down and makes it very much a Jacqueline Wilson experience so the audience will recognise it. Jacqueline's got such a particular voice that I wanted to match that so the audience weren't disappointed.

We did 26 episodes, all 15 minutes, and I wrote nine of them. These days it's almost unheard of for a writer in kids TV to write an entire series because there just isn't the time. The turnarounds are too fast. Obviously there were many other writers, but we had to make sure that the tone was right, that they all sound as if they'd been written by the same person.

So that's something else to bear in mind that sometimes you get commissioned to write on other shows, and you've got to be able to adapt someone's voice.

What about writing original shows?

Steven: I've come to believe that essentially there's a simple principle to this which is about getting the right talent from the word go, finding the right writers.

A long time ago a producer from Z Cars said when I was on a course that there were two types of writers. There are those who will write anything in order to get it on television and those who genuinely have something to say. And you always want to meet the latter.

And that's absolutely true. The notion of trying to create anything from scratch, and we do quite a lot of this, is: what is it that the writer really wants to explore? And in good stuff you get writers like Elly or Russell Davies or whomever. Cos they've got a real sense of this is an idea I want to explore and this is what it's all about.

When I was at Granada and we were developing children's dramas we had a notion of a development team, which was interesting. And I guess we all like to think of ourselves as pretty creative. We would come up with ideas, not bad ones. But the down side is who owns it? Who owns the characters? Who owns the vision? What is it you want to say? We all had a slightly different take on all the characters. We all had a slightly different take on what it might be exploring, the tone, and the pitch.

The best ideas for me always come from writers who have a really clear sense of wanting to explore something, a particular genre, character, or something about that. And that's what you hang onto. They really know what it is they're trying to do and then you've got a handle on that.

And we talk a bit about what's it really about. That's another quite interesting conversation. Cos lots of people go "I've got this comedy about a couple of kids and they get invaded by aliens," or "I've got this story about the mum runs off with the dad." It doesn't really matter what it is. Or a story about a kid who turns into a dog. Whatever it is, somewhere at the heart of it it's usually about something bigger and more interesting than it's just a comedy about this or it's just a comedy about that.

My Parents Are Aliens was a comedy that I worked on when I was at ITV – we had a lot of discussions about what we were really trying to explore. We didn't hit it in the first series. We didn't really even hit it till about the middle of the second series. We ended up with a sort of a phrase which said "My Parents Are Aliens is a comedy that explores the rules, rituals, and absurdities of the human condition."

And it sounds a bit grand, but we then started analysing stories and we'd go "Does this really do that? Is it really giving you a new perspective on the human condition? Is it really finding a kind of clever reversal on the way that we see the world?" Because if it isn't, it's just like comedy that happens in a lot of other series.

That becomes a really important point in creating stuff, to know what your point of difference is and be able to explore it. And if you don't get that, it's often quite hard to tangibly navigate whether your story's working. Cos you can write anything and go yeah it's fine. But what is it about and what do you want the audience to think when they get to the end of it? And unless you've got a kind of guiding principle it can be quite hard. You do really need to know where that story's going.

Elly: You also need rock solid characters. If you think about Friends, it's five people who drink coffee. But those are great, solid characters. You need a very good concept, and an unusual concept, but also within that then you need characters that you care about or you hate or that just provoke a reaction in you.

If you want to write for kids TV you really need to know what's on. You need to know the market. Often people approach me with stuff that we did three years ago, or is on at the moment. I don't mean know it inside out, but know what's on.

Steven: In comedy there's an interesting thing, which is cliché can be your friend. Because you want the familiarity. You want someone to have a kind of broad perspective and you want to exaggerate that. You want to know that type and Friends does that brilliantly. Phoebe's not a bit ditzy, she's incredibly ditzy. She's completely off the scale. She's still grounded as a real person but they pushed that character to the nth degree. And in drama cliché is your enemy.

I think that in the good dramas, in the good kids' dramas especially, you need complex characters. People are made up of many different facets. They're not just one thing. No one is ever the persona that they present. It's peeling away the layers of the onion. And good characters have that. They really do. People really know them inside out.

The other thing I just feel passionately about on character is that we get shorthand, particularly in comedies but in dramas as well, of types. And I think there's a problem because you keep seeing the same types come up again and again and again. You get the geeky one. You get the pretty one. You get the difficult teenage girl who's fifteen. They are so derivative of everything that you've ever seen before. And that's one I really try and steer away from. Because at the end of the day whatever your drama's about it's going to be driven by these characters that you create and that's what I really want to feel.

Recently we were talking about geeks and I said "Well what makes them geeky?" There are a million geeks in the world. There are computer geeks, technology geeks, TV geeks, film geeks, book geeks, train geeks, plane geeks. There are a million. And you need to get specific with that because otherwise your geeks are just like every other geek.

My nephew made me think about geeks in a completely different way. I said "How's school?" He said "Good. Good." I said "How's the sport?" He said "Great. Actually me and my friend are called the sports geeks." I said "Why is that?" He said "Because we just love sport." And he does you know. He lives and breathes sport. Day in, day out he gets up to play football, to play rugby, to play badminton. He can tell you every single footballer, not just in his team but in a million and one other teams. And that kind of knowledge - you understand that. That's what makes a character interesting.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6