Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Doctor Who and the BBC Writing Room


Doctor Who and the recent Planet of the Dead episode.

Like many people, I'm a fan of Doctor Who and am eagerly looking forward to the last few episodes with David Tennant (stagger, swoon) before he bows off our screens - as Doctor Who - forever.

Today it was brought to my attention that Raw Light is now listed on British Blogs, which I promptly visited and found this interesting website on Doctor Who, amongst other things.

If you're a writer and fancy trying your hand at writing for television - or radio - as I've said before on Raw Light, your first port of call must be the marvellous BBC Writers' Room website.

There you will find many examples of real BBC scripts - for Doctor Who, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, etc. - and thousands of tips on script-writing and other useful stuff, including their free ScriptSmart software download (not available for Mac, when I last checked, so sadly I can't use it) so you can concentrate on the dialogue, not the formatting.

It's great to have samples of these scripts online now, and to be able to watch missed episodes online or buy the DVDs. But it wasn't always that easy for writers - or fans, for that matter.

When I was a teenager, two of my school friends - Lynn and Sheila - used to send off specially for BBC scripts of Blakes 7, learn them by heart, then shoot barrages of dialogue at me relentlessly to check if I knew the episodes well enough to fill in the blanks (it was an all-girls' school and we were odd like that).

Lynn got married, Sheila died tragically young in a riding accident, and here I am, 42 years old and still able to quote vast chunks of Blakes 7 from memory. Just a pity it's kind of pointless knowledge ...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Now Jane, that is a poem waiting to be written if ever I heard one!