The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  Oh What a Lovely War! and The Seven Streams of the River Ota reinvented

  epic in brilliant ways – the former as political polemic, the latter as a

  tapestry of intimate stories woven across continents and cultures.

  Film has always been able to operate on an epic scale, from The Birth

  of a Nation by D.W. Griffith through Battleship Potemkin, Lawrence of

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  Arabia, Gone with the Wind, to Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti westerns’, the

  Godfather saga, Braveheart and Elizabeth.

  TV epic is perhaps different. Shows such as The West Wing, Edge of

  Darkness, State of Play and Rome are traditionally epic, but Twin Peaks, Doctor Who and The Sopranos also present a world (or multiple universes

  in the case of The Doctor) outside which nothing else is significant, at least

  for the time you are watching.

  With radio it is very difficult to operate on an epic scale solely through

  the medium of sound. It is perhaps easier in radio comedy, where the imagi -

  nation can take a freer, comic approach, as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the

  Galaxy. But the potential for intimacy and the difficulty or presenting a

  large cast of voices makes sweeping epic a challenge for radio drama.

  FULL CIRCLE

  Circular stories end where they begin, in some cases literally, in others

  more metaphorically. Some literal circular stories can have a negative or

  disorienting effect, whereby whatever happens and whatever we do, we are

  bound to a certain destiny or pattern. In American Beauty, perhaps Lester

  can never really break out of the American way, even if he does quit his job,

  smoke pot, and chase a girl the same age as his teenage daughter; his

  demise is preordained by virtue of his attempting to drop out but never

  really leaving it all behind. In The Lesson, the message is absurdist – the

  teacher and pupil are locked in a surreal, repeating scenario from which

  neither can escape. In Flashforward, circularity is a fundamental element

  of the premise – where everyone in the world gets a brief flash-forward to

  their life six months hence; it isn’t rigidly and exactly circular in shape, but

  the sense of having a destined point in the future that even with foresight

  the characters might not be able to change, is central to the premise.

  Other more metaphorical circular stories have the opposite, comic

  effect – for example, traditional sitcoms (that do not have an ongoing narra -

  tive arc), such as Fawlty Towers, Steptoe and Son, Porridge, where at the end of each episode the central characters find themselves trapped in the

  same place or position as at the begin ning. Curiously, though, the best sit -

  coms of this kind also tend to have a con tradictory undercurrent of sadness

  and poignancy (Basil Fawlty trapped in an awful marriage, Harold Steptoe

  bound to his father, jailbird Fletch stuck in prison).

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  FRACTURED

  In fractured and fragmented stories, life isn’t a logical, linear reality – but

  though disorienting, that existence can be as wonderful and poignant as it

  is weird. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind manages to surprise,

  delight and move all at the same time as it reinvents the ‘love story’. In 21

  Grams, the utterly non-linear structure tells an extraordinarily mov ing,

  tragic story in which the overwhelming emotions of love, grief and guilt are

  simply more important than chronology. The fragmentation of The Singing

  Detective is a kind of desperate attempt to escape from the prison of a

  hospital bed and a debilitating condition.

  REPETITIVE

  A small number of stories set up patterns that repeat with tiny variations.

  As such they can be optimistic and comedic, like Groundhog Day – where

  we can change the repeating pattern if given a chance and /or if we set our

  mind to it. Or even as in Run Lola Run, where the heroine gets the chance

  to save the day. But it’s most often a device in sci-fi and super natural TV

  series, where it is either a surreal, inescapable loop or a surreal, escapable

  loop – from The Twilight Zone to Star Trek, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf (and even Monty Python’s ‘Déjà Vu’ sketch). The point being that if there is no

  variation, then it’s simply repetitive – a circular story played out again and

  again, with no further, developing meaning.

  REVERSED

  A tiny number of stories that simply run backwards from end to beginning

  in mostly linear fashion. Pinter’s Betrayal does this; the play is not so much

  about the consequence of actions as about the gradual stripping away of

  those consequences to the origins of the three characters’ relationships. The

  effect is to give the audience a sense of dramatic irony about what is about

  to happen at any given moment, because they see the consequences of actions

  before the actions themselves as we work backwards through narrative and

  time.

  A large and fundamental part of the narrative of Memento runs in

  reverse. The effect is to put the audience in a sympathetic relationship with

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  a central character who is unable to form new memories, since neither

  audience nor hero know what has just happened; both are therefore dis -

  oriented, and this is where the tension in the story lies. Memento is more

  complex than this, though; concurrent with the reverse narrative is an

  intercutting, forward-running strand (in black and white) showing the events

  that lead up to the chronological beginning of the main narrative (in colour)

  that run in reverse, which we will therefore see (non-chronologically) at the

  end of the film. It is brilliantly, bewilderingly simple yet complex, and a

  deadly effective narrative technique.

  The key thing about both of these examples is: would the story work

  if it were played forward rather than in reverse? The answer is no – a

  straightforward linear treatment would not have the same tension and

  would not tell the story of either play or film.

  THE IMPACT OF SHAPE

  The first point is – what effect do you want to have? Do you want to satisfy

  an audience from beginning to end? Overwhelm them? Entrap and frustrate

  them? Disorient them? Surprise them? Subvert time for them?

  The second point is – do certain kinds and forms of story structures

  lend themselves to certain genres of story? Or rather, can you help yourself

  by making your kind of story and genre of story correspond?

  GENRE

  Genre is often presumed by aspiring writers to be a limiting, simplistic,

  oppressive thing – an unforgiving box in which ‘marketing’ will confine your

  creativity. As such, it is easily misunderstood by the novice and can tend to

  show how distant from an audience that writer’s mind is. You should use

  genre to help you do something that is recognisable yet original – to orient

  yourself and your audience without being derivative and slavish.

  Genre is a means of classification. If I want to go out and see a film or

  play, then the need to set a date (when I think I will still have some energy

  left after a day at work), to make the booking and to arrange a babysitter

  means it must be worth the effort. To d
ecide whether or not it might be worth

  it, I use genre. Do the write-ups, trailers and publicity tell me that it might

  be the kind of thing I would like to see? If a film is implied to be a taut

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  thriller yet turns out to be a quirky romantic comedy, then I will have

  reasonable cause for feeling like I have been conned out of my hard-earned

  money. Genre tells us what kind of story a story might be, whether it might

  suit our general tastes or our preference on a particular occasion.

  Robert McKee’s overview of film genre in Story is excellent and there’s

  no point trying to replicate or reinvent it here. The thing about genre is not

  to obfuscate or to deconstruct stories into endless sub-genres, but to clarify,

  to tell an audience something that is useful for their understanding and

  enjoyment of your story.

  The essential genres McKee identifies are the kind of stories you can

  and will see in any medium: love story, epic, war, coming-of-age, comedy,

  crime, social drama, adventure, historical, biographical, musical, sci-fi, fan -

  tasy. Some you are less likely to see in other mediums: sports, western,

  horror, mockumentary, docu-drama, action and animation are certainly not

  staples of theatre and radio. Some are particular to film alone, such as the

  ‘art’ film. The same sort of logic goes for other mediums, but their relation -

  ships with genre aren’t exactly the same as that of film.

  THEATRE AND GENRE

  Modern British theatre tends not to define genre rigidly, other than to

  broadly say whether something is West End (usually big, showy or to the

  popular taste, often musical, and often with star-name actors in the leads),

  off-West End (new writing at the Royal Court or Hampstead, mixed pro -

  gramming at the National or the Almeida), fringe/pub or regional repertory.

  In the ritual rites of ancient Greece, theatre took the form of either comedy,

  tragedy or satyr play. In Hamlet, Polonius bumbles his way through the

  various English Renaissance conjunctions of tragical, comical, historical

  and pastoral. Since then, genre has tended to be characterised by a parti -

  cular style, era and place – Jacobean tragedy, Restoration comedy, post-war

  Theatre of the Absurd, British kitchen-sink drama of the fifties and sixties.

  Classification by style and subject is now the norm – new plays are in-

  your-face/edgy (usually tragic), warm/popular (normally comic), intelligent/

  intellectual (sometimes political), documentary/verbatim (often political),

  or denoting a minority perspective in society (Afro-Caribbean, British-born

  Asian, gay/lesbian, disabled – also sometimes very political). The theatre

  industry doesn’t tend to spend its time dividing and sub-dividing genres, it

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  takes a much broader and more relaxed position because, ultimately, there

  are far fewer new plays to choose between at your nearest theatres (even in

  London) than there are new films to see at your nearest cinemas.

  RADIO AND GENRE

  Radio nods towards the essential film story types rather than eras or move -

  ments. But it also uses elements that are more in use in radio than else -

  where and, as such, it tweaks the genres – such as epistolary, diary,

  monologue. So you may be listening to a biographical drama that combines

  letters and diaries with dramatisation to tell the story.

  TELEVISION AND GENRE

  Television is where genre sub-divisions tend to have their most extreme but

  also most meaningful expressions, and these tend be a combination of genre

  with format. So for example there is the ‘returning crime show’. This can be

  an adapted famous-author detective ( Poirot); an updated famous-author

  detective ( Sherlock); an intellectual detective ( Inspector Morse); a psycho -

  logical detective ( Cracker); a period detective ( Foyle’s War); a time-slip detective ( Life on Mars); a magician detective ( Jonathan Creek); old-school cold-case coppers ( New Tricks); general police precinct ( Cops); specific police squad ( The Sweeney); forensic live case ( Silent Witness); forensic cold case ( Waking the Dead); police procedural ( Law and Order); court procedural

  ( Judge John Deed); police /court procedural ( Trial and Retribution); rural police ( Hamish Macbeth); rural period police ( Heartbeat); slick criminal

  POV ( Hustle); comedy criminal POV ( The Invisibles).

  The reason for such seemingly endless variations on how we describe

  the TV crime genre is because there are so many shows that are either

  going out or being repeated across the many, many channels available that

  it helps an audience distinguish between them and hit on the one they

  want. Other central TV genres include: precinct (from soaps to schools to

  offices), ensembles ( Auf Wiedersehn Pet, This Life), comedy-drama ( Cold Feet, Shameless), hi-concept ( Doctor Who, Torchwood), adventure ( Merlin, Robin Hood, Primeval), supernatural ( Being Human, Apparitions), thriller ( Spooks, Edge of Darkness, State of Play), state of the nation serial ( Our

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  Friends in the North, Boys from the Blackstuff, Sex Traffic, Criminal Justice).

  Some are an intriguing blend of various genres. Being Human is a

  supernatural comedy-horror combining flat-share ensemble with an epic

  battle between humanity and non-human beings on earth; the writer created

  a show that would cut from flatshare comedy to vampire horror in a

  heartbeat, and that’s what makes the genre of the show unique – and the

  tone of the show unique. But as the writer Toby Whithouse says, this wasn’t

  for the sake of being different:

  My ambition for Being Human has always been to write as realistic

  a show as possible. The conceit has always been: if these creatures

  really existed, what would their lives be like? Consequently I had to

  incorporate all the different tones and shades of real life, from the

  comedic to the tragic. To do anything else would have been deliberate

  decision to move even further away from reality.’

  TONE

  Wedded to genre is tone – the timbre, sensibility, feeling and style that

  suffuses your whole story. A mishmash of tone is almost certainly just as

  bad as a haphazard throwing together of genre. It usually indicates a lack

  of clarity in the writer’s thinking rather than a revolutionary intelligence.

  As with Toby Whithouse’s Being Human, only rarely will a writer pull off a

  clash of tone (and genre) – Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (musical

  with detective fantasy, medical realism and childhood flashback), Shake -

  speare’s The Winter’s Tale (pastoral comedy with a tragedy of envy and a

  romantic reconciliation). And even in these instances, the overall success

  and coherence is a matter of subjectivity and taste – it will work for some

  but not for others.

  But tone isn’t simply about the kind or sort of story it is, but the way

  in which the writer will characterise it in the moment (no matter what the

  genre). Realistic. Naturalistic. Heightened. Comic /farcical. Dark / black.

  Surreal /absurd. A particular, distinct stylistic and tonal treatment can set

  a story apart, especially if that treatment is somehow in contrast with what

  you expect of a premise, idea and genre. What is b
rilliant about the zombie

  story in Shaun of the Dead is that it is funny; what is distinctive about the

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  comedy is that it is set against the context of horror; what is surprising

  about both is that they run concurrent to a romantic tale of a boy losing,

  pursuing, saving and getting the girl. The League of Gentlemen, Nighty

  Night and The Thick of It are TV comedies that are so shot through respec -

  tively with the surreal, the dark/weird, and the most biting of satire that it

  sometimes feels like comedy is the last thing on the audience’s (and writer’s)

  mind. Yet they are funny – brilliantly, mind-bendingly, gut-wrench

  ingly

  funny. And they are all unique in tone.

  THE RIGHT FORM

  Many aspiring writers start out saying ‘I want to write a political thriller’

  or ‘road movie’ or ‘prison-cell two-hander for the stage’ or ‘tapestry of voices

  for radio’. Which is fine. But what can then happen is they start throwing

  obvious stock characters and clichéd scenarios at their chosen genre- or

  medium-driven idea. It’s important to let your idea /characters gestate and

  see which genre /medium they suit best. Stories are too often shoehorned

  into the wrong form. Great ideas can ultimately live in many forms – but

  they always start in just one. Allow your idea to find the right form rather

  than have one foisted upon it. The point of all this is that your idea, world

  and story should hold and hang together as one, rather than be incoherent

  and jarring. And again, for the maverick-minded out there, I’m not simply

  advocating the obvious and what has always been done before. Surprising

  and distinct is great. Strange and weird is fine. But confused and incoherent

  is simply not good storytelling.

  WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

  ‘DROIT MORAL’

  ‘Droit moral’ is the author’s right to claim and retain authorship of a work.

  It won’t give you power or control but it does recognise you as creator.

  I won’t dwell on the legal complexities of ownership, options, moral rights