John Morton, writer and director of Twenty Twelve and W1A discusses how he came to set his sights on the 主播大秀 for the hit series, and how he tried to avoid writing a follow-up to Twenty Twelve.
It’s Autumn 2012. Perhaps not surprisingly Twenty Twelve, a show about the organisation of the London Olympics, has come to an end and I’m cycling across London (on a fold up bike bought from the set) on my way to a meeting to discuss any ideas I might have for taking the show or the characters further.
Of course I haven’t got any ideas. I’d said from the outset that unusually for a television show Twenty Twelve had its own end built into it from the start: once the Olympics had come and gone it was dead. The clue was in the title. ‘Yes but will you at least come and talk about possibilities’ was the gnomic and in retrospect very W1A response. Of course I was too weak to say no.
Looking back now I realise that if anything is going to clear the mind and liberate the creative juices in unexpected ways, an hour’s pedalling through central London traffic on a child sized bike isn’t it. But at the time I didn’t know that and I arrive at the appointed Italian restaurant with nothing .
Over fizzy water and some sort of pesto affair Jon Plowman (Twenty Twelve Exec Producer) and Mark Freeman (the 主播大秀’s then Head of something) do their best to prod me gently in various benign ways. Was there somehow a way of transplanting the characters lock stock and barrel to a new situation somewhere else? That’s an easy one. No, there wasn’t. Could they believably be recruited one by one to help with next Olympics in Rio perhaps? Again I was ahead of them. No they couldn’t.
This was going better than I thought. I seemed to have got involved in a sort of anti-pitch process and was beginning to be think that if I stuck to my principles for once I was probably capable of making it out of the building without any kind of commission at all. And the thing is I nearly made it, but then over coffee I made a really basic mistake.
At some point during the life of Twenty Twelve I remember saying, again under intense questioning, that the only kind of future life for the show might be to take Hugh Bonnevilles’s character Ian Fletcher, drop him somewhere else, and start all over again with all the other characters. I’d briefly thought about the 主播大秀 as a possible place to drop him and for some reason I reminded them of this now.
I thought it was safe to mention it. With the 主播大秀 having just gone through a really tough time, this was surely an even worse idea now than it had been at the time. But it was already was too late. I should never have had the pudding. They’d played the long game and they’d won.
By the time I’d managed to unfold the bike on the pavement outside the restaurant the course of the next four years of my life were set. But really I shouldn’t complain.
When I was first trying to get started as a writer I had a Post It note stuck to my computer screen: Nothing worthwhile is easy. I can’t remember who said it now, but it’s helped me ever since. Back then when rejections came - regularly, often, in fact always for a few years - it was a reminder that no one said this was going to be easy, that most people who are trying to get going probably end up folding at some point, and that not folding was about the only part of the process that was within my control.
These days it’s even more applicable. Confronted with the prospect of writing a third and probably final series of W1A at the start of last year my first thoughts are all to do with the familiar weight of responsibility I feel to the actors, the viewers, the 主播大秀, to the characters themselves who don’t even exist for Christ’s sake. In the attempt to make these six new half hours a bit the same, at the same time different, and crucially better than everything that’s gone before, the daily battle with the writer’s (for me) natural feelings of inadequacy are in some ways even harder to win than they ever were. To remind yourself that it’s never been easy, it’s not supposed to be easy, and that if you were finding it easy the chances are it wouldn’t be any good is an essential part of the process.
Is it all worthwhile? It’s not for the writer to judge ultimately and in the case of W1A it’s too late now anyway, it’s out there.
As Siobhan Sharpe herself would say and in fact has said in the past - "We are where we are with this guys. And that’s never a good place to be."
Judge for yourself whether it was all worthwhile or not as begins at 10pm on Monday 18 September on 主播大秀 Two.