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10 On TV Drama: Soap, Flourescent TV

I love Soap Opera – oops, sorry: I mean “continuing drama”, foolish of me. Soap Opera is naturally a poor title, since it implies this kind of drama is melodramatic and somewhat, well, soapy which connotes the notion (to me at least) that whilst it might *seem* ordinary on the outside, if ingested it causes an unpleasant taste in the mouth and potential stomach upsets. Okay, that is not working at all. Let’s try again. I like Soap Opera because of this: That’s right, the scraps. Or fights, fisticuffs, rucks, rowdiness or whatever else you’d care to call them. A… Read More »10 On TV Drama: Soap, Flourescent TV

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10 On TV Drama: Sacrificing Fact For Drama

SPOILERS PRESENT History presents us Scribes with many stories that we can exploit, but it also presents us with a dilemma: just how true should a true story be? I’ve already discussed this notion from a philosophical standpoint here on the blog, but when it comes to historical drama on the telly, we’ve been shown, countless times, that it’s story and not fact we should stick to. Period drama is big business as far as TV Drama goes and post-90s in particular prodcos and institutions like The Beeb have been striking out beyond the “safe”, tried-and-tested adaptations of authors like… Read More »10 On TV Drama: Sacrificing Fact For Drama

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10 On TV Drama #4: Cops N’ Docs, Pt 2 – Dashing Docs and Naughty Nurses

SPOILERS PRESENT AS ALWAYS Carrying on with our “Cops N’ Docs” theme, I am going to investigate a long-running medical drama that I have watched from the start: Holby City. What makes it work, what brings the audiences back, week on, week out? Let’s take a look… HOLBY CITY (1999 – PRESENT) LOGLINE: The everyday lives, professional and personal, of the doctors, nurses and patients who find themselves, for various reasons, in the wards of the frenetic cardiac unit of Holby City General Hospital. Casualty began back in the eighties and whilst I have also watched this from the start,… Read More »10 On TV Drama #4: Cops N’ Docs, Pt 2 – Dashing Docs and Naughty Nurses

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10 on TV Drama #2: CSI: MIAMI and CSI:NY

WARNING: SPOILERSIn any franchise, there’s bound to be some dilution: if the subsequent Alien films lacked the shock value of that very first chestburst because we’d seen it before, then it’s kind of inevitable that CSI: Miami and CSI: NY are thought of as “nowhere near as good” as Crime Scene Investigation. I saw Anthony Zuicker on telly and he said he was literally whisked into an Exec’s office after a successful run of Crime Scene Investigation and told, “Come up with a city.” He said, “Erm…. Miami.” Whammo, said faceless Exec puts the wheels in motion: we’re gonna do… Read More »10 on TV Drama #2: CSI: MIAMI and CSI:NY

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10 On TV Drama #1: CSI [Las Vegas]

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS When Bang2write first started, I got nearly without exception only features. These days I get a lot of shorts and competition entries (I read a lot of Red Planet ten-pagers for example) as well as proposals, treatments and even short stories that scribes write for themselves so they can “know their story and characters inside out” which I think is a particularly good idea. In the last year, TV Drama has become a big thing amongst my Bang2writers. With every week that passes I get at least one TV Drama Pilot, sometimes with a Bible… Read More »10 On TV Drama #1: CSI [Las Vegas]

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Q+A: Marc Pye, TV Writer

Regular Readers of the blog in its previous AOL incarnation should remember this post about Marc just before his episode of Jimmy McGovern’s The Street was broadcast last year. If you’ve never heard of him however, Marc is a veteran writer for UK TV drama and all-round top bloke. We met in reality for the first time this year at Adrian Mead’s Long Distance Screenwriter course in Edinburgh, but I first heard from Marc himself when I read his feature screenplay The Mole for him way back in 2005, though I had actually read his stuff before in 2002 through… Read More »Q+A: Marc Pye, TV Writer

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