Gaby Chiappe 2

What are the differences between writing for a continuing drama and writing for a limited series?

I think the big difference is the serial element. If you're writing for something like EastEnders, you're told what needs to happen in your episode and then it's down to you to shape that and make that satisfying, whereas when you're working on something like Casualty, it's your job to come up with the story of the day.

Some people find it constraining when you're told what has to happen and feel they can be much more creative when they're coming up with the story of the day. I actually quite like being told exactly what's got to happen and then working out how it's going to happen. I quite like working in those very narrow parameters that you get with a soap like EastEnders.

But actually that's not answering your question. The difference between short-running series and long-running series is the fact that if it's only running to ten episodes, you haven't got a huge well-practiced machine. It's a much smaller group of people producing it and that makes for a kind of more family experience. It's easier to really feel part of the whole. So I'm wondering if, to me anyway, the difference is more to do with the experience of working on it rather than the experience of writing it.

Those big long-running series are well-oiled, well-run machines, and you're a very small part of it. By definition if you're a writer you're usually alone in your bedroom writing, and it's quite hard to feel part of the process. If you get a day on set, that helps to feel that it's something you're making rather than that those things just happen and you're kind of hanging on their coattails a bit.

I think with short running series it's much easier to feel like you're more organically part of what's going on.

You've been commissioned to write for the new series of Survivors...

It's so exciting. I can remember clearly bits of television that were important to me, and Survivors is the first grown-up thing I remember being allowed to watch. I couldn't quite believe my luck when I got on Survivors. There was something about writing it, hoping that I was doing something which would be as significant to somebody else as the original had been to me when I was however old.

What's it like updating a show that's more than thirty years old?

Adrian Hodges - who's the lead writer and it's very much his baby - was the one who reconceived it. Updating's a funny word because it suggests that you can just kind of haul things into the present, as if you can just sort of transpose something from one culture to another. The culture of Britain has changed hugely in thirty years, and so he's re-imagining how it would work, what it would mean, while retaining the spirit of the original.

It's very different. Lots of things have changed including our sensibilities about how we watch television and what we expect from television.

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