A group of strangers trying to develop two original children’s TV show ideas from scratch over WhatsApp and Zoom because they’re not allowed to leave the house. On the surface, it sounds like some kind of bizarre social experiment that would fail to get ethical approval. And yet, this has been the reality that has faced my fellow writers and I participating on the Zodiak Kids Writers' Award Scheme this past 8-9 months.
However, to give you the full flavour of what we’ve been getting up to, I’ll need to go right back to September 2019…
That was when I submitted my application to the competition, a joint-project between and 主播大秀 Writersroom NI. The brief was to write a script for a live-action, contemporary children’s comedy set in Northern Ireland, that had the potential to be developed into a series for C主播大秀.
As a newcomer to comedy writing – I had only ever written one script prior to this, a sitcom pilot that was swiftly rejected from the 主播大秀 Writersroom's Comedy Script window a few months earlier – I’ll be the first to admit that the idea of writing for children’s television was one that had never crossed my mind.
Nonetheless, an opportunity is an opportunity, so I quickly threw together a script about an underdog schoolgirl rugby team, submitted it, then sat back awaiting my rejection email. Two months later the email arrived, but curiously, it was congratulating me on making the shortlist and inviting me to a two-day workshop in January.
In the interim, I was also invited to participate in a workshop with Zodiak Kids to help brainstorm ideas for a children’s drama series that would be set in an integrated school in Northern Ireland – my first ever paid work as a writer, go me! And if ever I needed an introduction to the tight deadlines writers can sometimes face, this was the perfect example.
Following our brainstorming session on the Tuesday, I flew out to Vilnius for a Christmas getaway on Wednesday. I then spent the first two days of my trip sightseeing during the day and working on a two-page pitch in the evenings, that I then submitted on Thursday night to meet the Friday deadline we’d been set – incidentally, the worst cover version of Craig David’s 7 Days you’ll ever read.
Roll on the workshop in January, and the imposter syndrome set in almost immediately. Admittedly, it didn’t help that when we went round the table introducing ourselves everyone was talking about the various television and theatre projects they’d worked on previously and the best I could offer was “I work full-time as a statistician for the government”.
Thankfully though, things picked up from there and after an intense couple of days learning about writing for children’s TV, listening to some of Zodiak’s current writers talking about their experiences and getting to have some invaluable one-to-one conversations with the Zodiak producers about our show ideas, we were sent away to work on our final submissions (a 10-page sample and 2-page pitch).
Skip forward to June and, much to my surprise, I found out that I had been accepted onto the scheme alongside three brilliantly talented and hilarious writers in Andrew Parkhill (Soft Border Patrol), Eoin Cleland () and Louise Nesbitt (The Break) – cue the imposter syndrome again! However, in a Covid-induced change to plans, we would no longer be working individually on our previously pitched ideas, but we would instead be teaming up to work together on two projects.
The first of these projects would be to further develop the school-based series that had been worked on in the aforementioned brainstorming workshop. Or at least, that’s what we thought coming into our first Zoom call with Zodiak Kids Producer Raymond Lau (The Lodge, Millie Inbetween, Flatmates). Such is the fast paced, ever changing nature of children’s television, we were quickly told this idea was being scrapped and we would instead be coming up with our own show from scratch.
Nonetheless, all of us had come into this first meeting armed with a handful of characters to pitch for the school show and because Zodiak encouraged us to use a character-first approach throughout the scheme, this put us in a really strong starting position. Indeed, many of the characters that ended up in our final pitch were first introduced during this meeting.
When coming up with our new show idea, the key thing was that it had to be rooted in Northern Ireland, with characters and stories that are very much about here, but that would have universal appeal. Apart from that we were pretty much given free rein to brainstorm ideas. Let the fun begin!
After a week or two of brainstorming ideas, a large majority of which were along the lines of “it’s Babysitter’s Club, but instead of babysitting they pet-sit/do chores/create pension plans for mid-sized businesses”, we finally settled on doing a fish out of water story about a group of city kids forced to spend their weekends on a farm.
This would allow us to pitch a show to C主播大秀 that kids in rural areas could identify with and would also provide the distinctly Northern Irish setting and tone that we wanted for our show. Specifically, we decided to set our show on a social farm, a farm that uses traditional farming as a form of physical and psychological therapy for the people in society who need it most. We thought that this would be the perfect setting to bring together the diverse group of characters we wanted in our show to give an accurate representation of modern-day Northern Ireland.
With our setting picked and our character development well underway, we would spend the next month or so developing our characters further and deciding what stories we wanted to tell. We combined it all into a pitch document that was sent back and forth with producer Ray, with his feedback acting almost as a crash-course in developing the perfect pitch.
When we were all satisfied with our pitch, Ray presented it to Zodiak’s Creative Director Steven Andrew, and that’s when things got a bit weird for a couple of weeks…
Although he liked our pitch, Steven requested that we experiment with how the show might look if it was a teen-drama instead. So, over the next couple of weeks, our sweet, innocent kids went through puberty at an alarming rate, becoming a bunch of sexually active, drug-addled smugglers living on the Irish border. Kids really do grow up too fast these days!
As fun and interesting as working on this different approach was, it would only prove to be a brief detour. After a few weeks, we decided unanimously that we all felt stronger about our original concept and so we got into our time machine, went back to the days when our characters were still kids and started trying to come up with a pilot script for this version.
It was at this point we unfortunately had to say goodbye to Louise, who left the scheme due to other commitments. As if to play into the stereotype that everyone in Northern Ireland knows each other, Louise would be replaced on the scheme by my former schoolmate, the wonderfully funny and talented Sarah Gordon (Splendid Isolation).
With us back up to our full complement we ploughed on with outlines, scene by scenes and (eventually) the pilot script itself, getting a re-education in some writing basics like A, B & C plots along the way. At first glance, four writers working on a single script probably seems like a case of “too many cooks”, however it worked surprisingly well and there was no arguing that the resulting pilot script benefited from using this approach.
And just when we were satisfied with our pilot script, the fast paced, ever changing nature of children’s television would come back to bite us again. We got word, via a virtual commissioning briefing our producer Ray had attended, that C主播大秀 had outlined the key things they wanted included in any future live-action comedy/drama pitches. The big thing that stood out for our farm show, was that they want more adventure elements in their future shows.
So, after another few weeks of rewrites, and the addition of a B-plot where the kids find a mysterious cave on the farm, we finally got our final pilot script and pitch document completed and these were submitted formally by Zodiak to the C主播大秀 commissioning team.
With our first project finally completed several months later than scheduled and with Sarah now having to leave the scheme early too, it was decided that we wouldn’t go into as much depth in terms of our second project. Nonetheless, we still managed to create a very solid pitch document, and each come up with a handful of hilarious action-packed sample scenes for a live-action adventure comedy series based on Irish mythology. This project remains in development, with Zodiak also intending to start pitching it around in the near future.
And so, the scheme has now come to an end. I’m just glad it’s coincided nicely with the lifting of lockdown restrictions otherwise I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with all this free time I suddenly have. Overall, it was a fantastic scheme to be involved in and I’ll always be eternally grateful to Zodiak for giving me this opportunity and to my fellow writers on the scheme for being so much fun to work alongside.
If I had one piece of advice for new writers, it’s that you should apply for anything and everything, because you never know where you’ll get your first opportunity – certainly I didn’t expect mine to come writing for children’s television!