Ellen Taylor

Ellen has produced and written for Casualty and Dream Team. She is currently developing a series called Mirror, Mirror for BBC3.

You're both a writer and a producer...

Which is quite interesting, at the moment.  I've been on both sides of the fence and I found it a useful place to be in a way. One of the things about television and the BBC – particularly in more recent years, partly because of John Yorke and the Writers Academy – is that they are trying to put writers back at the heart of shows and developing new drama. 

I think traditionally a lot of producers haven't respected the roles of writers enough.  If you're a big, top, famous writer who comes to them with your big series idea, then it's like "Yeah we love you",  but for writers getting onto the process and working on those big, established series, it's sometimes difficult to get respected.

Tell us about Mirror, Mirror.

Basically BBC3 wanted a Teen series, so as an in-house team, we were asked to put forward various pitches for different series ideas, and one of them was a hair and beauty academy in Manchester. So out of this meeting of four ideas, they liked three of them, I went away and developed two ideas, one was for a kind of Shameless Teen thing and then there was this one. They made the decision that this was the one to go with, I was given hair and beauty in Manchester, kids, teenagers and that was it.

Daisy, who I knew before as a writer I really respected, has a really good contemporary voice but with real warmth, and we got in a room with another Manchester writer called Ian Kershaw and other young writers who hadn't developed a new show before and said "Right, lets come up with some characters, let's come up with some storylines," and we did it like a group of writers sitting round a table.

It was really good and we all got really excited and it felt like a proper organic way to develop a series.  And what was great is that Daisy's obviously the lead writer on the show, but everybody will now write an episode and everybody feels like they're part of the show.  It's great, and yet it is young writers, nobody who's had their own show before, writers who have just had a couple of episodes on the big shows, one writer who's only ever written one episode of Torchwood, an episode I happened to read, and thought had a really original voice. 

So it is true that there's lots of ways in, but sometimes that one script we find on our desk we go "Brilliant, lets meet them."

 

Ellen Taylor was talking at the recent Q&A for the Everyword Festival of New Writing, together with Hilary Martin and Daisy Coulam. You can also read a full transcript of the event.