The Voice of Skins

HEY, HERE'S A nifty little blog interview of Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain (he created the show with his Dad) by Arestia Dehmassi .

(I've never heard of this portal/site anevibe. Looks neat. Anybody have more info?)

The nice thing about the interview, conducted over MSN, apparently -- very Skins... is she focuses on the writing:

Dehmassi: When you were writing the 3rd series did you plan to make it a little different than the past series?

Brittain: It's more of an episode to episode thing than a series thing in my opinion. Each writer is pretty much allowed to write whatever they want, and that means that the tone can swing quite violently between episodes, which I think is essentially a good thing; you never quite know what you're getting with an episode of Skins. However, we always want to tell a different story each year, and in the telling of that story we employ a variety of different styles, which means that each series is, yes, different.

Dehmassi: Can you tell us a little about the writing process, from how you choose the writers to how you all work together?

Brittain: We generally employ playwrights as writers, who we find all over the place in London's huge theatre scene. They tend to be emerging talents, having had one or two professional productions of their stuff, or a couple of radio plays, which are numerous and very popular in theUK. That method means we often find ourselves with young writers who have never written for television before, but are full of ideas and are not jaded by years of working in what can often be a thankless industry. We also use writers from our contributors, who are young people brought in to help us out. After a couple of years in the writers’ room, they're pretty well trained, and, with a bit of help, have produced some of the best episodes we've ever done.

In terms of how we work together, we all just sit in a big room a couple of times a week and argue for a few hours. It takes a long time, but eventually we come up with the goods.

We're all mates as well, so we support and help each other loads.

Dunno how I feel about that Americanized Skins, though. What's the point? They'll never allow it to be as in your face and edgy as the British version. The Americanized Skins was called The O.C. or 90210, right? I mean, if they can't make a show as edgy as Degrassi for heaven's sake, what hope do they have of pulling off Skins?

Also, if you want to follow Jamie Brittain on Twitter, his handle is belchingdevil.

H/T to Floppy for the link