I confess it now: I’m just not hipster enough. I read Cosmopolitan and buy my clothes from River Island and get ready for a night out listening to Taylor Swift and I use a Mac instead of a typewriter. It’s probably anathema to some skewed perception of the Oxford Existence, but there you go. I also thoroughly enjoy my ongoing drama (cough cough soaps cough cough). Yes, my heart belongs to glossy, gritty neo-realist high-concept post-watershed dramas — right now, the prospect of Cillian Murphy’s steely-eyed smoulder in Peaky Blinders is the only thing getting me through each week — but when term’s out, and the days back home stretch into long inky black nights and a wintry chill, nothing can ever really beat cosying up in a snuggly set of PJs, hot cocoa in hand, to indulge in the pure decadence that is willing Moira not to give up on Cain…
Whether or not you put yourself ‘above’ the realm of the soap opera, whether or not you only deign to watch art house film forevermore, is, frankly, a bit beside the point. Soap operas aren’t really harmed by the opinions which fly about: ‘low brow’, ‘cheesy’, ‘cliched’. They remain one of the most popular — consistently popular — forms of television drama around, and have been right up there since their inception (points to Coronation Street paving the way, six decades ago). Almost every weekday evening, a high proportion of the British population tunes in to watch the everyday melodrama of the characters in Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Patronising soaps is futile; the ratings speak for themselves. We’re a nation of soap-lovers, generally speaking. That tells us something: whatever they’re doing, it’s working, and with such a devoted fan base to cite, anyone wanting to work in the TV industry can learn something from them.
With this in mind, I embarked on an amazing opportunity over the summer — a work placement in the Script Department at Lime Pictures, who produce the nation’s favourite youth-orientated soap drama, Hollyoaks. Quite frankly, I’m a screenwriting obsessive, so the chance to see a script room at work was, needless to say, one I jumped at. And, yes, I learned a lot.
Ongoing drama is intense. I’m not talking about the story lines — although it’s soap, so of course, the genre thrives on intensity — so much as I’m talking about the effort that goes into putting together a single twenty three-minute TV programme. Of course, that’s because it’s relentless. Whereas high concept shows like Luther and Ripper Street are producing maybe eight hours’ worth of television per series, Hollyoaks and similar shows run consistently, airing around five times a week. This means that production can’t stop — storylines need to be constantly generating, cameras need to be constantly rolling. The audience might feel natural high points and suspensions and major climaxes in the show — but no matter how big the story or the production values, the next day, cast, crew and production team have to get straight back to work. A lot of people in the various departments get to work before 8AM and leave after 7PM. Between those hours, they hardly stop working.
An entire dramatic world can be created on one set. Lime Studios is located in a very inconspicuous location, and actually inhabits an old, converted secondary school premises. Nonetheless, with the right feats of clever architectural engineering, the whole of ‘Hollyoaks village’ — including a school, a police station, a hospital, several houses, a village square of shops, and a courtroom — can be fitted into this small space. It makes for an interesting experience, going from a shop into a living room into a prison cell, but despite the fact the studios are a maze to get used to, it’s also incredible to see how much can be done with one location.
Producing a soap opera is probably more creatively demanding than producing a high-concept TV show. Or it is, at least, easily in competition with it – albeit in a different way. To begin with, producers have to foresee several years’ worth of story lines — unlike in other TV drama, where the core of a show’s output is governed by their use of a small number of writers and producers working on the story, a soap opera requires a large team of people working across different roles, who have to come up with ideas. Four or five story lines can be seen working in one episode of a soap; but ‘backstage’ in the script room, there can be as many as twelve story lines simultaneously under discussion. And just as some of those will be in relation to next week’s episodes, others will be thinking ahead six weeks, or even six months.
The role of the screenwriter working on an ongoing drama is not to invent the stories. Screenwriters like Neil Cross (Luther), Heidi Thomas (Call the Midwife), and Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) are often responsible for overseeing the entire content of their TV programmes; a lot of the time, they’ll even write (or co-write) every episode. Usually this means they get the title of ‘executive producer’ (or ‘show runner’ in the US) to go along with the title of screenwriter. Effectively, these writers also write ‘in house’. However, ongoing drama is different. The screenplays for a show like Hollyoaks are written by freelance screenwriters (as opposed to in-house), but they aren’t responsible for originating the stories they are writing; this responsibility lies with the Storyliners, and is overseen by the Series Producers and Executive Producer (for Hollyoaks, these roles are filled by Di Burrows and Ian Macleod, and Bryan Kirkwood — formerly lauded for overhauling EastEnders a few years back — as Executive Producer). Once storylines are approved — several months in advance of air date — screenwriters are then commissioned to put together a script. Their responsibilities include making sure it is properly formatted, stringing the various story threads together in a cinematic, sensible way, making sure the dialogue is character — and plot — appropriate, and ultimately producing a script which works on screen.
There can be around 4 or 5 different roles to work in if you work in a soap opera Script Department. The writing process doesn’t stop with the screenwriter’s first draft. Working under the Series Producers are the Series Editors, who will be responsible for a ‘story block’ (usually a week’s worth of episodes) and will have to ensure everything in that block goes as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, they develop their block until it’s ready to be filmed, and they go with it as editors right up until it gets to post-production and onto the screen. This involves liaising with screenwriters — usually over the phone, although Lime is a friendly place, and one or two popped in to talk over tea while I was there — and going through scripts to make edits, ensuring they all gel together as a unit and there are no overlaps or discrepancies. They also have to liaise with their colleagues who are editing the pre- and proceeding weeks’ script blocks to ensure there are no overlaps there.
Script Editors aren’t the only people working in the Script Department, however. For instance, in there you can also find the Continuity Editors, who are responsible for curating (and knowing) years’ and years’ worth of backstory – and sometimes that means character biographies and story-lines spanning decades. Thankfully most of this is catalogued in a computer system – but the continuity editors must know their way around this system, how to find that information, and have an inclination as to what that information is in the first place. Which, naturally, entails a lot of reading and memorising.
Scripts can be written up to six months in advance of air date; storylines can be in the pipeline for a year. It is impossible for a soap to run effectively if it doesn’t stay completely ahead of its own game. This can get especially tricky, however, when ‘top secret’ story lines — whodunnit reveals, etc — are reserved even from the team, let alone the wider audiences. And despite their original conception happening sometimes even over a month in advance, that doesn’t mean it can’t keep changing right up until the day of shooting. Editors and writers are always on call as practical things as much as thematic ones can get in the way of sticking to the original version: an actor might get ill, for instance, or a director might feel the written dialogue jars with the way they are able to shoot the scene. Either way, changes are nearly always required, and the Script Department needs to be around to make those changes.
The series producer is responsible for overseeing all content. This means they must work with every department ensuring needs are met, ideas realised and problems solved; they must be aware of what is happening all the time, from the overarching story and character arcs and the backstory to all characters, to the beat plots (that’s the scene-by-scene breakdown) of every episode. It’s one of the most demanding roles anybody in television might undertake.
Soap operas can’t survive without their research team. The characters and storylines of soap operas depend on the way they remain topical, current, and relevant to their audience. The audience of Hollyoaks has a particularly young demographic, so with this in mind — and while definitely not excluding the concerns of more mature audiences — it tries to resonate with the problems young people might potentially face. It also has a huge responsibility towards outputting that kind of content as sensitively as it can, which is why research is important (aside from making the show more authentic). Research can be wide and varied — from contacting medical professionals about certain illnesses that characters in the show have, or the kind of weapons that could be used to perform an ‘unsolvable’ murder, to a certain celebrity’s favourite brand of chewing gum — but it must be meticulous. The research team in the Hollyoaks Script Department is currently helmed by Charlotte Pattulo (a former Pembroke girl), who recently introduced a systematic way of tracking character research developments to make research / continuity crossover work more efficient.
It’s not about the draft; it’s about the redrafts. I’ve heard it said a few times that screenwriting is the unartistic or commercial writing career to pursue, because it necessitates working to the spec of other people’s ideas, and having whatever you do write interfered with by post-eds. While it’s true that writers who write for the screen generally have a bit less autonomy than, say, poets or novelists, ultimately it remains that all writing, before it is published, has to undergo editing of some kind. For the writer who thrives on collaboration, solution-finding, or just seeing a project roll through the genesis of page to screen — including all its incarnations — screenwriting is a perfect career choice. Anybody hoping to show-run needs to cut their teeth writing for a soap opera: it’s an invaluable lesson in how to run work as part of a team, self-edit, learn from criticism, develop dialogue and descriptive writing skills, and put a personal spin on an established project without trying to change or overshadow it. And there is a reason why so many writers get hooked on writing for soaps, too. Even if they envisage only starting out there, most of them stick around for life: because it’s challenging, it requires discipline and a very particular brand of mental stamina, a willingness to keep learning, and — perhaps most importantly of all — it’s bloody good fun.
