★★★★★
Five stars

I arrived at George Street Odeon and sat down to hear members of the packed cinema in a dialogue of mockingjay whistling — the Hunger Games trilogy has clearly made an impact on a large number of people. And rightly so. The story spans enough genres to have everyone interested: fantasy, romance, action; you name it, it’s there. The dystopian world of Panem is at times more harrowing than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

The Hunger Games is probably the best adaptation I have seen of a book series, and the latest release Mockingjay Part 1, is no exception to this. The casting remains astounding: this film introduces Julianne Moore as President Coin, Elden Henson as Pollux and Natalie Dormer as Cressida, to name but a few, all of whom fit perfectly the characters in the book. I was not at first convinced at the justification for this new fashion for dividing the final film of a series into two, which began with Harry Potter, and was followed by the Twilight saga’s Breaking Dawn in 2010-2011. The Hobbit, which is a third of the length of each of The Lord of the Rings books, astoundingly has been divided into three parts: clearly a method to stretch out the material to make as much money as possible. However, Mockingjay is the most complex of this series and I realised, watching the first part of the film, to do justice to the serious content of this final instalment, dividing the films into two is somewhat necessary. 

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Mockingjay is probably the most difficult of the three to adapt, since it does not have the continuous action of the first two novels. The characters spend most of their time static in the underground of District 13, removing the use of exciting changes of scenery in the first two films. The dialogue in this fi lm, then, is especially important for the purposes of retaining interest, and it does this whilst being both realistic and moving. I was particularly struck by the ability of Jennifer Lawrence to show a real sense of grief and the effects of trauma on her character.

Katniss is shown to be strong willed, but also human, and she is troubled to an appropriate extend after her experiences: she has a three-dimensional personality, and is an excellent example of a powerful and authentic female character.

The film was able to portray the most unpleasant scenes with sensitivity. This was particularly the case in the scene set in a makeshift hospital in District 8, in which we were able to see enough of the wounded to be shocked, but not so much that it became a horror film. The same applied to Katniss’ deeply shocking visit to the fire-bombed District 12 to find a heap of charred bodies. I don’t recommend seeing it alone.

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I can’t have been the only one to miss the presence of the lovely Josh Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark, who spends the majority of the film imprisoned in the Capitol. His attempted rescue, the final sequence of the film, is a terrifying experience: seeing Panem’s version of Room 101 saw me resist the urge to hide behind my notebook. It was a great shame that Peeta’s attack on Katniss due to his new, ‘hijacked’ state resulted in large numbers of the audience laughing. In a way, I thought that this was due to an inability on the part of the audience to cope with feeling shocked, but it must surely have been possible to film the scene in such a way that didn’t allow the viewers to laugh as a result of their disbelief. 

Not that this ruined the film. I was unable to stop thinking about what the story has to say about the nature of oppression, and the effect of war on the innocent. I almost wish that The Hunger Games could somehow be used to encourage an interest in politics in its early-teen fanbase. Most importantly though, I suggest you see the film soon before the Odeon runs out of free posters.

Paddington Bear doesn’t seem like the most obvious subject to be associated with the topic of censorship. But that sweet, cuddly façade hides a disgusting, sexually explicit monster. Or at least that’s what the British Board of Film Classification thought when it gave the film a PG rating for “mild sexual references”. That may be a step far for a kid’s film about a CGI ursine whose most distinctive characteristic is liking marmalade, not corrupting young minds. But it does raise the oft forgotten role that the BBFC, and censorship, has to play in our modern cinematic experience.

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The BBFC has been around since 1912, created by the film industry so it could regulate itself rather than let the government intervene. It’s the body responsible for the small screen that pops up before a film starts, reading “Classified for Viewing”, and it decides what certification films deserve. Though a film can legally be shown without a BBFC rating, there’s no example in recent memory of that happening, and local authorities almost religiously follow what their guidance says. 

So far, so ordinary. But the annals of the BBFC’s history reveal a fascinating, fractious, and often deeply controversial relationship with cinema itself. Take Ken Russell’s historical drama-horror The Devils, starring Oliver Reid as a Seventeenth Century Catholic priest who was accused of witchcraft. The film was a test case for the BBFC, as it was lobbied from all sides due to the blasphemous, sexually explicit, overtly violent, and profanity-filled nature of the production. An orgiastic dream sequence involving nuns having sex with an effigy of Christ was eventually cut, though the original edit of the film has, to this day, never been released for public consumption and the film remains unreleased on DVD in the US.

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An even better example would be the furore around the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, which caused such controversy that the kneejerk reaction was taken by the BBFC to ban the word ‘chainsaw’ from all film titles before they would even be considered for rating.

However, the BBFC’s most notorious moment came in 1984, when it gained the additional role of rating film releases on video. This led to the infamous ‘Video Nasties’ list; a catalogue of straight-to-video, foreign, or niche exploitation films that were outright banned from release. This included such family-friendly classics as Cannibal Apocalypse, Cannibal Holocaust, Gestapo’s Last Orgy, SS Experiment Camp, and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. Clearly, fascism and consumption of human flesh were big in the ‘80s. Campaigns by both The Times and The Daily Mail fuelled public concern over the level of obscenity in films; hence the BBFC demanded drastic cuts to the films, ranging from 19 seconds to over 11 minutes, in order for them to gain certification. 

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Though, in hindsight, that might seem to be a moment when censorship ventured into the hysterical, the BBFC has come under fire more often for its perceived lax attitude towards certifying films. In 1996, The Daily Mail, that bastion of common sense, again campaigned the BBFC, this time on the grounds that it had released David Cronenberg’s Crash without any cuts at all. Similar uproar emerged when Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange were released with X ratings, the backlash so severe against Clockwork that Kubrick himself withdrew the film from exhibition. 

Recent films have equally borne the heft of the BBFC’s axe. A Serbian Film had to have over four minutes cut from its running time to gain an 18 rating, whilst The Human Centipede 2 was initially banned by the BBFC from release, before 42 cuts were made for it to also be given an 18 rating.

It’s fascinating that a body which ultimately decides what films can be shown in cinemas, and in what edited form, is so subordinate in the public’s consciousness. Though it might not initially seem so, the BBFC has a fascinating history, one that charts not only many of the greatest films ever made, but also the national reaction towards them. 

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.

One would be hard-pressed to argue that the BT Studio is suited to expansive, elaborate shows, given that it has the floor area of a broom cupboard and the technical sophistication of a child’s puppet theatre. No, the BT is ideal for less aesthetically ambitious productions. It is an intimate, atmospheric space, Oxford’s equivalent of the Bush Theatre if you will, in which audience and actors can immerse themselves in a shared experience and engage in stimulating artistic dialogue. When it’s done well, that is.

It is this intimate quality that Sam Ward, an established face in Oxford drama, hopes to finesse with his latest directorial effort, Martin Crimp’s The Country, which starts its run on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine a play more suited to the BT than Crimp’s tense, three-handed thriller. A masterfully conceived exploration of trust and deception, it presents the gradual unravelling of a couple’s bucolic dream with an engaging deftness.

Richard (Nicholas Finerty) and Corinne (Phoebe Hames) have left the city in search of a peaceful, pastoral idyll. This fragile reality is shattered when, in the middle of the night, Richard brings home a girl (Gráinne O’Mahoney) he claims to have found unconscious at the side of the road. The girl’s identity and her relationship to Richard are slowly exposed through revelation after revelation, engendering an escalating atmosphere of tension and intrigue.

I meet Ward, Finerty and O’Mahoney in LMH’s Old Library, a spacious, columned room entirely unlike the BT, but nevertheless utilised as a rehearsal space. After witnessing some rehearsals, I ask Ward why he wanted to put on The Country.

“I saw the play six years ago at the Salisbury Playhouse”, he tells me, “and, although the acting was dire, I was struck by its potential. I remember thinking that it was a great play, but that I could have done it so much better.”

 “I reread it recently and, technically, itis one of the best play’s I have ever come across. Every line is so carefully chosen. Every scene is so carefully constructed. It’s obviously written by someone who knows how people interact and I’ve wanted to do a play like that for ages.”

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To perform a play with such vibrant humanity requires realistic characters and to achieve this, Ward has ensured the cast adopt an almost Stanislavskian approach to their roles, instructing them to discern the motivations behind their actions, and allowing them to inform their performance.

“Before we run through scenes, we establish what each character’s objective is and how it develops”, he explains. “Once these objectives have been established, we improvise the scenes based around them. I never tell them where to move or how to deliver lines.”

Convincing interaction between characters is also essential to conveying believable emotion and Ward emphasises the importance of listening, both physically and verbally, in this.

“We’ve done exercises that involve watching each other’s weight distribution and watching each others micro-movements, then making an assessment of response based on that. We’ve also done improvisations where each response is informed by a particular word in the preceding line, all to ensure that everyone is really listening to each other.”

I ask Finerty and O’Mahoney if they feel that their performances are enhanced by such a diligent, concentrated approach.

“It has been really helpful in providing a foundation to the rest of my performance”, O’Mahoney tells me. “For me, the text is key. Each word is so important. They inform what you’re going to pick up on and that feeds really well into this type of improvisation.”

“It’s really exciting”, enthuses Finerty. “Because it’s not prescriptively directed, we know there are peaks and falls in the scene, but they come in slightly different places depending on how the scene develops, and how each line is spoken and responded to. It’s different every night.”

From the rehearsals I see, the approach Ward has utilised is undoubtedly conducive to engaging, convincing performances. LMH’s Old Library is not a particularly atmospheric room, but the air is tangibly charged with emotion as Finerty and O’Mahoney go through a particularly dramatic scene. I can imagine the BT being almost electric with tension.

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But for Ward, it is not just the performances that are integral to creating this edge-of-your-seat atmosphere. The staging is also significant, as is the evocative texture of the set.

“The stage will be thrust so the audience will be on three sides”, he explains. “When the stage is thrust, the audience gets sucked in and they become part of the action. It’s especially appropriate staging here as the characters are always so conscious of being watched, and the intimacy of the audience builds on that.”

“Materials are also very important in the play. Wood and flesh are very prominent. So it’s important to get an earthy, grounded, visceral feel, which will give a real sense of rising dread.”

The strength of Ward’s vision is evident, but for the play to be genuinely memorable, it requires intense concentration and commitment from the cast. Only then will convincing character interaction be crystallised on stage, only then will justice be done to Crimp’s impactful writing, only then will the audience leave mopping tension-induced sweat from their brow, and only then will the BT’s potential for striking, intimate drama be fulfilled.