Writers Academy 27
We've now read the first ten pages of all of our 495 entries for the Writers Academy. As you can see, we all sit in a room together (Readers, my team and I) with "The Pile". It is a gruelling, nerve-wracking, but also hugely enjoyable three days. Thank you all the writers who entered for their brilliant imaginations, jokes, characters, heart-stopping moments and emotional hits.
We can't give individual feedback to every script that doesn't get through, but we do all compare notes at the end and try and get a sense of some general observations.
We always try and spot trends - but this year that was really heard. The scripts were more varied than they have ever been - which is encouraging. Some mini trends did emerge though: gambling, bullying, suicides, Taliban metaphors, kids gangs/street talk, graphic sex talk, characters called "ASBO" and MPs. Make whatever you want from that -we drew no sensible conclusions.
Unfortunately, there was a worrying lack of decent female lead characters, or indeed female characters overall. Why this should be noticeable less than in other years is disturbing.
Unlike previous years, when the theatre pieces have stood out as the most interesting creatively, there were many more really ambitious TV screenplay samples. Hurrah!
We now have 157 longlisted scripts - each of which will get two full reads from members of the Drama department. We will be shortlisting these down 30 at the beginning of July, so I'd better get reading.....
You can also follow me on Twitter for updates @cerimeyrick
Comment number 1.
At 27th May 2011, Hisashikarazu wrote:Out of curiosity roughly what percentage of the scripts had female characters?
And what percentage would you have hoped for?
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Comment number 2.
At 29th May 2011, Ceri Meyrick wrote:Most of them had female characters. It was the quality of those characters that we were disappointed in. Not something you can put a percentage on, but it was definitely down on last year.
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Comment number 3.
At 2nd Jun 2011, strobin wrote:All this user's posts have been removed.Why?
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Comment number 4.
At 28th Jul 2011, bowlhead wrote:Were all the readers women? In the photo I can see seven bodies and only one possible man-shape.
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Comment number 5.
At 2nd Aug 2011, Debbie Baisden wrote:I wrote a sit com with four leading female roles for your recent competition laughing stock. Would this have been considered?
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Comment number 6.
At 5th Aug 2011, Ceri Meyrick wrote:@bowlhead we had six female two male readers
@Debbie Baisden Yes, if it fitted the entry criteria
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