by Paul Ashton
and theft. But there is one thing to say that’s worth remembering: YOU
CAN’T COPYRIGHT PROTECT A BASIC IDEA OR PREMISE. You can copyright
specific detail – such as that which goes into a synopsis, outline, treatment
THE BEGINNING 65
or script. But you can’t claim someone has stolen your idea about setting a
drama series in a postal sorting office, or a comedy series in the world of
film extras or an office smoking room. I saw versions of all these basic ideas
before Sorted, Extras and The Smoking Room appeared on the BBC. The only real similarities between the unproduced and the produced versions
were in the basic set-up and idea, which anyone could have come up with.
The point is that writers will independently come up with extremely
similar ideas all the time. Ideas are cheap. It is the delivery of a singular
vision, the wholly distinct take or version of an idea, that is coveted by
producers. The big idea is what you make of it, and you alone could ever
make of it. Don’t ape something else or try to second-guess what you think
people want. It never really works. What works is when you hit on an idea
or theme that has taken hold of you, and therefore takes hold of character,
story, script and audience.
THEME
A ‘theme park’ is pretty much the lowest common denominator of what ‘theme’
signifies: taking a successful idea and franchising it in fairground rides,
cuddly toys and out-of-work actors dressed ‘in character’. However:
Theme is not subject. Subject is the thing you choose to write about
and explore. Theme is the thing you have to say about that subject – the
thing that no one else has to say in quite the same way that you do.
Theme is your central message – even if it is complex and
contradictory.
Theme is your attitude – even if it is divided, or hypocritical.
Theme is your passion – even if you don’t exactly know why you feel
the way you do.
Theme is the thing you are trying to say – even if what you are
trying to say cannot be reduced to anything smaller than the
entirety of your script.
Theme is the big idea. Your big idea.
Theme is voice. Your voice.
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UNIVERSAL
The problem with a ‘theme’ is that it can easily seem very vague, universal
– conceptual. It’s all well and good to want to write a state-of-the-nation,
contemporary tale about politics and the media. But this in itself doesn’t
say much about the story or the writer. However, a post-watershed TV
serial about an ambitious and idealistic investigative newspaper journalist
whose dogged enquiry into the death of the young political aide to an equally
ambitious and idealistic ‘new generation’ MP (of whom the journalist is an
old friend) is a brilliant foray into an emotionally and politically gripping
world of people trying to square their ideals both with their work and with
their fail ings and weaknesses.
The former idea is by nobody; the latter is by Paul Abbott. The basic
idea could be done a hundred ways; State of Play could only have been writ -
ten by Abbott.
The other big problem with theme is that writers don’t necessarily
know what it is they are trying to say when they begin and may never be
able to lock it down neatly. You don’t need to be able to boil down your
theme into a handy platitude – you just need to feel and know that it is in
there somewhere.
If a story, idea, characters are bugging you and keeping you up at
night, demanding to be written, then theme will be in there somewhere. So
learn to recognise when a story has taken hold of your instincts to com -
municate something to an audience – even if you’re never sure exactly what
it is you mean to say.
CONCEPT AND WORLD
Most stories don’t really have a ‘concept’ – most stories approximate to
perceived and received human reality and history; therefore there’s no need
to conceptualise them. They are tales of people being people in the world.
Concepts are dangerous things in that it is easy to get stuck and lost in
them – stuck because every element of story and plot has to fit, lost because
in order to make them fit you can dig yourself in deeper and deeper with
rules, sub-rules and micro-rules that justify the concept to the n th degree.
‘High’ concepts work best when they are kept fairly simple, such as
the time-travel in Life on Mars, the supernatural flatshare in Being Human,
THE BEGINNING 67
the cloning in A Number, the end of fertility in Children of Men. Or when
they are turned inside out, such as the completely and strange realities of
Being John Malkovich and Lost Highways. Generally speaking, the more
time you spend conceptualising the rules and regula tions of your fictional
world, the less useful time you spend on character, story, drama, emotional
depth.
Remember, if you are inventing a universe not quite like or very
unlike this one, then the rules can be what you want them to be – but they
must cohere and make sense with one another. Weird places are fine –
jumbled ones are not. Set your perameters clearly and simply, then concen -
trate on making what your characters do ring true within them.
The world you create must be coherent with itself and on its own
terms. It must hang together, even if what it constitutes looks very weird.
The world of Being John Malkovich is pretty bonkers, but it doesn’t feel
incoherent – just very strange indeed.
PREMISE
The premise is essentially the dramatic starting point of the story in your
idea. It isn’t: ‘Imagine a vampire, werewolf and ghost share a house.’ It is:
‘What if a vampire and werewolf were helping one another to not kill people
while sharing a house with a ghost who doesn’t yet understand why she
isn’t dead.’ The former is an idea. The latter is a dramatic premise – with
desires and needs, journeys to go on, obstacles to surmount, drama, conflict.
A good premise asks a dramatic question about the characters. Why
are the werewolf and vampire helping one another to not kill people? What
brought them to this, despite their killing instinct? Is it only their instinct
they must fight against? Are they the only vampire and werewolf who live
this way in this curious but familiar universe? Why is the ghost here? What
is it she doesn’t understand about her death (or life) that has made her a
ghost, bound to the house in which she died? How will finding out the truth
change her? How will this strangest of house-shares impact on the three
characters? How will they keep their extraordinary secret in a normal street,
in a normal city, on any given, normal day?
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PREMISE AND CHARACTER
A good premise isn’t just about asking dramatic questions of characters. It
is about creating the kinds of personalities for whom dramatic questions
arise – whether once in their life or every day of it. For Willy Russell’s
Shirley Valentine or Rita, it’s a fundamental question that arises once: is
this it for me and my life? Can I aspire to something more? Dare I aspire?
Dare I live with the consequences, bad and good?
For others the question returns and /or develops. For James Bond, film
by film, it is: how do I avert the disaster posed by the villain and come
through it unscathed and fundamentally unchanged at the end? For The
Doctor, incarnation by incarnation, it is: why do my travels across the uni -
verse always bring me back to earth and humanity? What is it that makes
humanity worth saving? For Jane Tennison, crime by crime, it is: can I keep
on catching the criminal on behalf of society without it ruining me as a
person and a woman in the end?
PREMISE AND EMOTION
A character premise is only as strong as the emotional engagement an
audience has with their story. If we don’t care whether or not Shirley, Rita,
James, the Doctor or Jane will succeed, then the premise has no meaning
and no legs. The writer can’t anticipate who will or won’t engage with any
given character. But you can invest your characters and the traits that pro -
pel them into a dramatic journey with the potential to connect with us – to
make us fearful, hopeful, relieved.
You need to home in on what is universal about that emotion. We need
not know intimately the details of unemployed ex-steel workers in Sheffield
in order to understand and share the pain of disenfranchised, emasculated
men deprived of a wage, a vocation and self-worth. Most cultures will under -
stand the story of hope winning out over hopelessness in The Full Monty.
Without emotion, a premise is just a story option.
With emotion, a premise can become compulsive viewing.
Without emotion, you have: how does a Mafia gangster keep his friends,
enemies, partners, competition, family and lovers on his side?
With emotion, you have: how does a contemporary Mafia gangster
keep everyone on his side when his kids are going off the rails, his wife is
THE BEGINNING 69
distant, his mother despises him, his uncle craves his power, his friends and
‘employees’ are a mixed bag of thuggish fools and foolish thugs, his own
violent temper is his greatest enemy, and therapy with a smart female
psychiatrist creates as many problems as the low self-esteem that sent him
there seeking help in the first place?
On the face of it, it should not be easy to engage with a dangerous
Mafia boss. But in practice Tony Soprano pulls you in because he is human,
flawed, recognisable, and never stops raising emotional questions wherever
he goes and whatever he does. He may be the unlikely lord of a criminal
empire, but he’s also a man who starts out feeling like a failure to his kids,
wife, mother – and himself. Each of these relationships has potentially end -
less dramatic possibilities – they hooked a big audience for a long, long time
and The Sopranos is regularly voted the best-ever TV drama.
THE BIG IDEA
The big idea, ultimately, is what you say about the world through what your
characters do in every moment we see them. It is the expression of the
universal and the essential in the minutiae of human want, need, desire,
love, hate, anger, hurt, hope, despair – and, most importantly, action.
IDEA AND MEDIUM
What is it that makes an idea better for one medium than another?
It depends what you want to do with your idea. The complexity of
State of Play and The Singing Detective lent themselves perfectly to TV
serial drama over a number of hours and weeks. Both have since been
adapted by Hollywood as feature films and they necessarily had to change.
What Abbott and Potter wanted to do on the small screen was ultimately
different to what Hollywood wanted to do with the same ideas on the big
screen. You must match the scale, experience and volume of material you
have to what works in a given medium. (For what it’s worth, both were
much, much better in their original TV form.)
Some stories will work (for better or worse) in every medium – includ -
ing novels, many of which adapt into theatre, TV and radio alike. Other
stories don’t necessarily work in every medium, and are perfect in only one.
The beauty of great adaptation from one medium to another is not that you
70 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
wrench an idea into a new form, but that you breathe a new life, expression
and form into it.
THEATRE
Theatre is the place where the physical, spatial dialectics of two (or more)
characters in a scenario and the conflict or tension between them can be
enough to make a play – which has been increasingly the case in new writ -
ing in and since the twentieth century (from Mamet’s Oleanna to Enda
Walsh’s Disco Pigs to Mike Bartlett’s Contractions). Revolutionary Road is a lovely film (adapted from a book) but it could work well on stage because it
is so focused on a limited number of characters in mostly stageable ‘scenes’,
where dialogue and emotional dialectic are the primary driving forces.
Dead Man’s Shoes, however, would not work in the theatre – the flashbacks,
the visual backdrop, the loan avenger, are all pure cinema.
RADIO
Radio is where you can create a singular relationship with a listener that
has the potential fluidity that only sound, audio and voice can bring. If you
want to express your characters in ways that seem strange anywhere else,
then radio is the place where all voices – even those that are not human,
animal or alien – can be justified and made real. A good radio idea is one
that will come to true life in the listener’s head.
FILM
Film is the medium where visual scope is key and where you can use the
canvas of a huge screen to zoom in close and zoom out wide to tell the story
through images. It is hard to imagine how one might evoke the true scale
of Lawrence of Arabia emerging alone from the desert, a shimmering speck
on the horizon slowly coming into focus in the foreground, in any medium
other than film. You could tell a different version of his story elsewhere, but
the desert and ‘Arabia’ will never receive so bold an expression of their
overwhelming scale.
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TELEVISION
TV is where stories can develop an ongoing relationship with an audience
that exists in the privacy and heart of their living room – of their family
and home life. You can do continuing series on radio ( The Archers is the
world’s longest-running soap of all time, having started in 1951), but TV is
where they find their most intensive, audience-pulling expression and life.
A great TV idea is usually one that will reach out to and grab hold of an
audience in their home on a regular basis, whether for a few days, a few
weeks, or for life.
WHAT’S THE STORY?
As I have said, the need to engage an audience through character is
fundamental. Story is what you do with that character, that engagement,
and that need to say something.
Story isn’t: what scrapes can I make up for a character who travels
through time and space in a telephone box? Or: what 1970s crimes can
I
throw at a twenty-first century policeman who has gone back in time?
Story is: why does a Time Lord care so much about the human race
and what lengths will he go to in order to help it save itself? Or: how can a
strait-laced twenty-first century DCI solve crimes in the corrupt 1970s
without twenty-first century technology and techniques, knowing that he
must solve them in order to get back home?
The former is a basic idea. The latter is story – an engaging character
focus with conflicts, problems, tensions and obstacles to achieving the things
that con firm who they are and why we stick with them.
The plot is the order in which you structure the events of a story to
reach a particular end and have a particular effect on character and audi -
ence. The story is why we should care, why we stick with it – the effect and
meaning you seek to have.
The plot is the route that we take.
The story is the journey that we make.
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BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
Getting lost and distracted by plot is very easy. Don’t be disheartened. It’s
easy to mistake the detail of plot for the fundaments of the story. Plot is
where so and so happens, and then they do this, and then that happens, and
then they say this or feel the other. Story is where things happen as a
consequence of what a character says, thinks, believes, feels, and – most
crucially – does.
I have read many scripts – probably thousands – where the story does
not work because the beginning and ending are not absolutely, necessarily,
essentially and inextricably connected. In strong stories, the end is a neces -
sary outcome of the beginning, and the beginning is the necessary starting
point for the end you wish to reach for the characters you have created.
Many inexperienced writers say they don’t like to know what the end -
ing will be because it spoils the writing process and they get bored. Well,
people don’t commission writers to have fun, but to tell stories that have an
impact. And if you get bored that easily, then perhaps your characters just