Tuesday 11 September 2007

The Academy begins

The BBC Writers' Academy starts next week. But we had a taster session today in the form of a trip to Birmingham to visit the Doctors team and look round the set. It was a good relaxed start to what is going to become 13 frenzied weeks of overload.

Despite some requests, I have decided that I won't be blogging in much detail. It's a small group of people (8 of us), and the potential for treading on people's toes or invading their privacy is too great. All I will say, on the basis of a day spent together in Birmingham and in the minibus there and back, is that they seem a great bunch of guys and that I'm looking forward to spending 13 weeks in their company.

Neither will you find a blow by blow account here of what we learn or what the tutors tell us. I'm not sure whether that would be fair to the tutors, but, anyway, I'm simply not going to have the time or the energy.

I will let you know how I'm doing from time to time, and give you a taster of what we're up to.

So, for example, I can tell you that our weekly timetable involves two days of lectures/seminars/exercises etc at Elstree, a day of "homework", a day of "guest lectures" at Elstree, and a weekly tutorial, one-to-one, with John Yorke himself. And there'll be a lot of homework in the evenings and over the weekends too. We'll also be writing a trial-run episode of Doctors, and a real-life commissioned episode.

All that before Christmas. And then, if we do OK, we spend next year working on one episode of each of Casualty, Holby City and EastEnders.

All I can say is that I'm looking forward to the whole thing with an almost embarrassing amount of glee.

Roll on Monday!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! That sounds amazing - and it couldn't happen to a nicer chap. Well done Paul! And do blog at least enough to give us a flavour of what's happening - I'm curious to hear what you think of it all.