Paul Abbot Doesn't Believe in Typing

THE LAST session I attended at the 2007 Banff TV festival was a conversation with one of my favorite TV writers.

Paul Abbot might not be a household name over on these shores, but he's quite the big deal in the U.K. with several constituencies. There are those who love him for his longstanding work on Coronation Street. Then, others who admire his dark comedy Shameless. There's the work he did on several beloved Cracker episodes. And then there's Touching Evil.

Then there are people like me who admire all that work that came before, but who swoon like little girly men at the thought of State of Play, the six part miniseries set in the netherworld between journalism and British Politics.

I was disappointed to see that Paul was there only via satellite, but once you settled in (and got used to the video lag over the mojo wire from London) there was much to admire and report.

Firstly, he said that just this afternoon he's been outlining State of Play II. He says he's a bit stuck at the moment, as he started the 'wrong way round. Not exactly sure what he meant by that, but he assured the audience that BBC would probably have the sequel in hand by next autumn.

The American adaptation is also proceeding. He says he's very interested and encouraged seeing how they get it down to 120 pages. (His original script for the six hour series was 850 pages long.)

They're also working heavily on an American version of Shameless, possibly involving Woody Harrelson. Abbot said it was probably destined for cable since "They found out that fully 1/4 of the material couldn't be broadcast conventionally thanks to FCC rules." Ah America, America.

During the course of the interview, when he spoke about State of Play, I was pretty surprised to discover how he apparently did the thing you're never supposed to do. "I wrote the first ten scenes with no idea where it was going or how it was going to end. I just wanted to get the characters and inhabit the world."

Oh man. But he was just getting going.

Because it's a world, believe it or not, that he managed to reflect mightily without doing any research. "I'd never been inside a newsroom, and I'd never been inside parliament."

Right about this time I'm digging my nails into my knee. Because clearly this guy is a better writer than I could ever aspire to be. When you're that good, you make breaking the rules look easy. And they're not.

Abbot said that the closer he got to the end, the more scared he got, and the more that helped his writing. Been there, done that. Great. At least he's not an alien.

During the Q&A, I asked a question about the complexity at the heart of State of Play, and how he was able to maintain it; whether he had any difficulty getting the narrative past gatekeepers either at BBC or elsewhere. Abbot mostly shrugged off the question, but not before making a great point that though you have to view the network person you're dealing with as your customer, dealing with their note doesn't have to mean doing what they say. In fact, sometimes it's better to go deeper.

If you try sometimes, I guess, you just might find, you give'em what they need.

Abbot also said something intriguing about the experience of writing that I've been pondering myself lately. He said that in many ways, one of the biggest challenges of doing a six part series by yourself is that by the end of it, you're an entirely different writer than you were at the start. I certainly found that writing Across The River last summer. It's an amazing thing to try and reconcile the end with the start, just because you're in such a vastly different place when all the dust and tears and choices have settled.

Abbot was passionate about the need for story teams, and says that, against a lot of advice, he went and bought a building to establish a "writer's studio" in London, where teams of writers can be mentored and paired with a project. Abbot sees that as the way out of the British tendency to only do short runs of shows. In places like Canada that model is viewed a lot more favorably than it is by pros like Abbot. He came out and said that most top quality U.S. drama, working on that 22 episode a year model, is much better than anything that the British are producing.

See? The grass is always greener.

Finally, Abbot waxed angry and eloquently on the subject on the need for writers to be able to inject their personality into their work. He sees a fundamental flaw in a system where writers are forced to conform and respond to the whims of powerful script editors and producers.

"Your personality is what we want. The entire way you're training writers is wrong if you don't allow for that. We tend to train writers to be nothing more than fairly literate typists." Abbot thinks that Producers have their place in crafting the series for market, "but once the story is told, it ought to be up to the writer to find their way through. Otherwise you're just wasting your money."