what's it like... Writing EastEnders

By Andrew Collins

I cannot tell a lie — I killed Nick Cotton's son. I murdered Ashley Cotton in cold blood. It was me who drained the brake fluid out of Mark Fowler's motorbike the night before. Ashley, in a fit of pique after an argument with Mark that I instigated in the Queen Vic, hopped on the bike and revved it up. It was me who arranged for the keys to be conveniently left in the ignition. Then off he roared, narrowly missing Dot Cotton, his own grandmother, outside the Vic, and smashed into the laundrette, coming off the bike and landing in a heap on the road.Even Dr Trueman couldn't save him.

Throw on the bracelets, guv, it's a fair cop. This all happened on Thursday 14 June, 2001, when episode 1149 of EastEnders was first transmitted. It was one of mine. I wrote it. All of it. It was I who penned the fatal stage direction, "DR TRUEMAN EXAMINES ASHLEY'S HEAD - WE SEE FROM HIS EXPRESSION THAT IT'S NOT GOOD."

Oh but it was good. In total, I wrote 11 episodes of Britain's premier soap opera over a two-year period: that's six and a half hours of primetime television drama, watched by around 16 million people, give or take the odd 0.2 million. EastEnders was the best and the hardest job I've ever had. More fulfilling than running Q magazine, and more arduous than collecting trolleys for Sainsbury's in Northampton town centre week in, week out, when I was doing my A-levels. (Come to think of it, harder than doing my A-levels as well.)

Of all the potentially glamorous and exotic gigs I've had within the media since arriving in Big Town from the provinces in the mid-1980s, becoming an EastEnders writer has generated by far the most interest and inquisition, from people in and outside the biz. A friend of my sister's in Northampton actually accused her of lying when she told them what I did. Acquaintances who half-know me say they saw my name on the credits at the end of an EastEnders and assumed it must be another Andrew Collins. They can easily conceive of me interviewing Paul McCartney or pontificating on Radio 4, but writing EastEnders? No way! That's "other people", isn't it?

Well, it was me for a while there, a small but significant cog in the giant perpetual motion machine that is EastEnders. And being asked to write the episode in which Ashley Cotton — an established character and spawn of Walford's long-time arch villain Nick — drew his final breath on the back of a motorbike was my proudest moment. (I also introduced a brand new character, but it was only a pet goldfish called Posh so as you can imagine the folks back home in Northampton dine out on it a lot less.)

How did I come to be writing EastEnders? That's always the first question. (Can you bring Dirty Den back? — that's always the second.) How did a music journalist with no qualifications even to be a music journalist end up moving Phil Mitchell, Steve Owen and Kat Slater around Albert Square like pawns in a giant game of soapy chess? And what's it like?

To get to Albert Square, we first have to pass through Brookside Close and a place you may never have heard of called Charnham. Whilst working at Q in 1994 I despatched myself to the suburbs of Liverpool to write a short piece for the magazine on the inexorable rise of Brookside (this was body-under-the-patio time).

I watched the C4 soap religiously, and genial series producer Mal Young, having given me a thrilling tour of the set, suggested I might think of writing for the programme. Me? But I'm a humble music scribe, I protested. I review sleeper albums.

Mal explained that many an untrained scriptwriter had found employment at Brookside (it was that kind of community-minded, rather 1980s set-up) — indeed they encouraged new people to try out. Watching the programme religiously, he said, was sufficient qualification.

I thought nothing more of it. But when Mal was poached by the fledgling Channel 5 in early 1997 and brought down to London to launch their five-nights-a-week soap, he called me up again. With a limited budget and an unforgiving turnover (the other Britsoaps were still only on a leisurely two or three times a week back then), they needed as many keen writers as they could get their hands on, and wanted to start one or two out from scratch.

I was still sceptical. My only experience of script-writing had been a few radio comedy sketches, plus I was by now the Editor of Q, a full-time job, with car and everything. But Mal is a very persuasive man. I went to some early meetings, where the characters and stories were being thrashed out, and was given a commission, my own episode (#19) of what was now called Family Affairs and set in fictional Charnham — which may or may not have been just outside Maidenhead and later miraculously grew its own tube station to make it seem more metropolitan. (It's still running every weekday on C5, by the way, which is more than can be said for poor old Brookside.)

They gave me a couple of sample scripts by professionals from which to ape the page format, and a "story document" providing the bare narrative bones for my "ep". (Let's call them eps, it's what people in telly say — they also shorten cliffhanger to "cliff" and break stories down into "beats", ie individual events. Now we're talking.)

continued on page 8 continued from page 7 All of a sudden, I was a soap writer..

It's important to note here that soap writers don't, as a rule, come up with the plots. This would not be practical. For an "ongoing drama" (the BBC are still quaintly shy of the term "soap") to work, storylines must be plotted way in advance, the major ones - a murder, a pregnancy, a new family, anything above a new goldfish —across months, sometimes a whole year. There are teams of people working full-time on this called storyliners. In conjunction with producers and script editors, they form the engine room of any soap. Writers are generally freelance, but a big soap like EastEnders will have 50 or more on their books, and the work can be regular enough to constitute "a living" (unless of course you fall out of favour, as I eventually did at Family Affairs after two and half years and over 30 episodes).

A commission will mean a meeting round a conference table with stewed coffee and Danish pastries. Here, all writers and script editors working on a given week of programmes will converge to discuss their eps with the storyliners — ask questions, suggest changes, sometimes swap "beats" with other writers (hey! jazz!).

The 70-page story document, from which everyone works, lays out an entire month's storylines — these snake through the eps like lettering in a stick of seaside rock. I always think of an individual episode as a slice of salami cut from a huge ongoing sausage — the writer's task is to move the action along for 26 minutes and leave everything in the right place for the next writer.

Eps must of course join up, seamlessly, and continuity is paramount, so even though writers go off and write in tortured isolation in their garrets, constant recourse to the bigger picture is required, and at least four drafts of each script are built in to what can be a ten-week writing and editing period.

At EastEnders, six months pass between Danish pastries and transmission. (This is why fireworks night and other public holidays are always celebrated in soaps — it's the only way to make them seem current and topical.)

The planning or story document contains important information like "TX" (transmission) dates, all key deadlines inbetween (commission, first draft, second draft, final draft and "rehearsal script" — which is the one the actors actually get to see, about a month ahead of filming), plus sunrise and sunset times for the week the ep will go out, and "other info", such as characters' birthdays and school terms.

In your idealised writer's world, you imagine Bridge Street market swarming with the entire cast like a scene out of Oliver!, but actors have rights, and holidays, and you can't expect June Brown to be on standby just so that her character Dot can deliver one withering aside at the Fowlers' fruit stall. EastEnders weeks are shot in overlapping fortnights — week one: outside on "the Lot" and permanent sets only (the important ones: pub, laundrette, café); week two: permanent sets and studio only (all other sets are erected and dismantled as required, but for practical reasons have to stay up for no less than two weeks). Of the ep's 26 minutes, 19.5 minutes should be shot in studio and 6.5 minutes on the lot. Keep up.

One surreal feature of the commissioning meeting is haggling over sets: each week's writers must "inherit" three existing sets, and add three of their own choosing ("I can live without the B&B, but I must have Pat and Roy's kitchen"). Then, just when you think you're getting somewhere, under all the sunsets and birthdays on the cover sheet you reach the dreaded "CAST RESTRICTIONS".

Eek! It reads, "Pat — Week 2 Only." That means Pam St Clement, who plays matriarch Pat Evans, is unavailable for the first week of filming and can thus only be seen inside. No chats in the market, no quiet words outside the Vic, and bang goes that dynamite exchange you'd envisaged when she comes out to pick up the milk from the step in her dressing gown.

Before you can sit down at your PC and open a new document entitled "EastEnders/ep#1149" and type in :"SCENE 1. COTTONS', LIVING ROOM. INT. DAY LIGHT. 07.30" there are so many factors to, well, factor in. You require Peggy to be in the Laundrette in Scene 5, and behind the bar of the Vic in Scene 7 - would she actually have time to get from one to the other while Scene 6 is playing out? It's a logistical minefield, and requires military planning to get right and keep real.

One of EastEnders' most revered veterans is Tony Jordan, a master-writer (untrained, used to be a barrow boy) who began in 1989 and now occupies a consultancy position. He offers invaluable workshops to new writers where he'll run an old EastEnders from the Arthur Fowler years and break down exactly why it works, drilling into you the idea that structure is everything, dialogue is just window dressing.

Back at five-nights-a-week, corner-cutting Family Affairs, few of EastEnders' planning luxuries were afforded. I don't recall ever having to do even a second draft until I went off the rails towards the end. No time for such fripperies. Three months between pastries and TX, none of your six. As a result of the tight schedule, very little leeway was given to writers when I was there — individual scenes were plotted out for you. It was basically a dialogue-writing job, window dressing, although a priceless apprenticeship in the craft and the pressures of the process.

I loved Family Affairs, there was a real have-a-go spirit there. Plus, it allowed me to fulfil the old cliché and actually give up my day job. (Interestingly, you are always getting told off for using clichés in soap, apart from the ones that soap invented, like nobody in East London having a washing machine.)

The other great thing about Family Affairs is that nobody watched Channel 5 then, so it was like paid training without the embarrassment. (Actually, an unprecedented amount of people watched it when most of the cast were spectacularly killed in a barge explosion, as per the ratings-grabbing plan of the new producers. Pity they didn't tune in again the next day. Or the next.)

I got my EastEnders call in July 1999: an invitation to "try out" for the show, engineered, it must be said, by a Mr Mal Young, who had by now been poached by the BBC as head of drama series. After 30 eps of Family Affairs, I felt I had paid my dues, but the journey from C5 to BBC1, from a million viewers to 16 million, was far greater than the unlikely tube ride from Charnham Common to Walford East

To use another transport analogy, being able to drive a car does not automatically qualify you to fly a 747. However I passed my audition — it's a bit like applying for a university: there are a certain number of "places" available, and hopefuls must pass an entry exam, which involves writing a full scene breakdown and half a dozen actual scenes of dialogue based on a real EastEnders story document.

My first actual, commissioned ep was #931, transmitted on 24 January 2000. You're sure to remember it — Jeff got a mobile phone ("Very posh!"), Barry and Natalie came home from their honeymoon and Terry bought a car. I know. Not a ground-breaking or ratings-grabbing episode (it was a Monday; Mondays rarely are), but ideal for the Square virgin. I even got to work in my own self-contained sub-story, in which then-landlord Dan Sullivan kept asking punters to help him with a crossword. It was Pinteresque I tell you.

While creating my first ever ep I absorbed the ancient wisdom of Walford, all contained in the oracle-like Writers' Guide. There are a number of hard and fast rules. Never write phonetic "Cockneyisms" in your script (ain't, 'ere, dunno, darlin', innit) — leave that to the actors. Equally, try to avoid "Can I have a quick/quiet word?" — it's a phrase that has been overused and is thus banned until further notice. Don't use exclamation marks too often, it only encourages the actors to over-act. Never start a line of dialogue with "Listen" or "Look", as actors tend to put these tics in anyway and need no encouragement. Characters can't say "God knows" or "Jesus Christ!" because of the Sunday afternoon omnibus. Come into scenes late and get out early: in others words, don't waste time with hellos and goodbyes. End each scene on a reaction shot eg. OUT ON JIM, FUMING.

Certain among the cast are well known for polishing their own dialogue, but this is a privilege well-earned. Mike Reid, once star of the show as Frank Butcher, would famously add his own choice phrases, like "What do you take me for? Some kind of pilchard?" (How I wish I'd written that.)

Each new scriptwriter is also equipped with a handy map of the Square and what's known in most TV dramas as "the Bible", a fat document giving all the characters lengthy and detailed biographies (their "backstory" if you will). Herein, you will discover that Pauline Fowler had childhood dreams about marrying Stewart Granger, and that Ian Beale took up boxing as a boy to please his Dad, touches that have never been seen or mentioned but add to the reality of the show. What's telling about the Bible I was given in the summer of '99 is how many of the characters are now gone (Conor Flaherty, anyone? Lenny Wallace? Lilly Mattock?). There is also a full-time 'Enders archivist and two researchers, whom you may consult at any reasonable hour to find out if Terry and Irene have an ansaphone and other such vital stuff.

Another potential niggle you learn is that you can't use real names. When, in my first ep, Barry and Natalie came back from what was obviously Eurodisney, we had to call it Theme Park Continental. I invented the name of Dot's favourite hair salon for one episode — Mario's — and this had to be checked out against every existing hairdressers in the country to avoid a clash. Inevitably, there already is a Mario's, so I had to come up with a new one. Bernardo's (named in honour of the great Italian film-maker Bertolucci) was fine.

The truth is, you have to live and breathe EastEnders to successfully work for it. You must find the Mario's/Bernardo's conundrum vital, even thrilling (lucklily, I did). You must watch the programme religiously — at the expense, I would suggest, of any other soap, indeed any other programme that might interfere with your total absorption in the task ahead.

A single draft of EastEnders takes two weeks (there is no deadline-surfing here). Now I'm the type of indecisive multi-tasker who likes to have a number of plates spinning at one time, but I soon found out that writing EastEnders is not something you can "tap away at" between other jobs when the muse strikes. You must wake in the morning thinking of your episode, and go to bed at night similarly focussed: eat, drink, breathe, dream, shave EastEnders (like you've got to time to shave!). It's the only way to fully immerse yourself in what is, lest we forget, a tough job — creating a workable 26-minute drama that will not only stand up to the scrutiny of crack script editors but also some of telly's most hardcore viewers, who (Ital)will(unital) notice if Terry and Irene suddenly acquire an ansaphone.

The first draft is the hardest: structuring the story so that up to seven storylines interweave logically and dramatically and every single scene "moves the action along". The average script is 8,000 words long — that's approximately 70 pages, comprising around 30 scenes. Usually, you'll find you're still on Scene 20 when the word-count moves into the final 500; cramming it all in is the big problem. Using the Jordan Method, you will have drawn a grid with all the scenes on and used different coloured pens to mark the "arc" of each story. By the end of the first draft, this will look like one of Russell Crowe's crazy maths calculations from A Beautiful Mind.

It's difficult to think about anything else when you've gone native in Walford. Getting Sonia home from college in order to accidentally bump into Zoe and Jamie on the market without making it look like she just came home to do this is the sort of stuff that haunts you. What if there was a burst pipe at college? In August? Perhaps she forgot a folder? She forgot a folder last week! Like any good drama, the audience must never glimpse the gears going round. You, the writer, sometimes feel as if you are caught up in the mechanism like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

When you've finished a draft you then have to endure the mental torture of waiting for your first set of "notes" from the script editor - usually some bright young thing many years your junior. (SCRIPT EDITOR SITS DOWN FOR MEETING WITH WRITER — WE SEE FROM HIS EXPRESSION THAT IT'S NOT GOOD.)

These notes can go on for pages, even if your draft works. It's like being back at school, with teacher applying ticks and crosses to your work. Draft two is like draft one, except with twice as much information to process ("Can we change Janine's reason for coming in the Minute Mart").

Draft three should be a "dialogue polish" but unless you're Tony Jordan it never is. That'll be draft four — if things have gone phenomenally well — by which time they'll be baying for a rehearsal script for the director (who comes in quite late in the game). I wrote six drafts of the episode where Garry proposed (for the second time) to Lynne. There was blood on the walls in that one. Mine. I have seen writers replaced at a very late stage if the draft isn't working out. This is not a drill, this is EastEnders.

It's all something of a mindfuck, to use some non-TV jargon. As is keeping schtum. Beans must remain resolutely unspilled at all times (after all, tabloids would pay good money for EastEnders storylines six months in advance). Confidentiality was a high enough priority when I started; it was stepped up to war footing during Who Shot Phil?

The attempted assassination of Square hardman Phil Mitchell in 2001 was shrouded in maximum secrecy. The identity of his assailant was strictly need-to-know — writers and script editors were kept well out of the loop. Story documents were censored.

Around this time an EastEnders writer was burgled and their PC was taken; thereafter we were all advised by bomber command to save our episodes on disc and not the hard drive.

I was always vigilant not to put old script documents into the Lambeth recycling bin until the episodes covered had been broadcast, and as an extra security measure I renamed the EastEnders folder on my desktop "Time Team"—- that would keep snoopers out!

It really is like working for the secret service. Even when drunk you must guard what you know, and I am proud to say I never blabbed. Although it was easy when people asked me who shot Phil: I had no idea.

The warm glow of satisfaction when your episode is finally shown on telly is hard to beat. Most writers do it for the magic of this moment, although the money is very nice too (mainly thanks to sales — you get an instant repeat fee for the omnibus, and further royalties when EastEnders is sold abroad or shown on BBC Choice, and if you're lucky enough to have a clip used on This Morning, there's £50 right there).

Once the rehearsal script is signed off (it's called "going to white" as that particular draft is printed on white foolscap), your work as a writer is done. No falling back exhausted onto a bed made of script editor's notes though. If you're in heavy rotation you will be deep into your next ep when your previous one is shown. Once you reach a certain level of competence and reliability, they'll commission you to write a double: two consecutive eps, a Thursday and a Friday, which is a bit like being king of the world. If you imagine that a double is twice as much work as writing a single, you are wrong - it's harder than that (for a start, you don't get twice as much time to do it in). I never found the time to go up to Borehamwood and watch one of my eps being filmed, a perk that was always on offer.

I trod the hallowed tarmac around Albert Square — it's much smaller than it looks on TV, that's what everyone says — but apart from that my relationship with EastEnders was a distant one, conducted mostly on the phone or by email. That's the way it should be. I did meet a couple of the stars: Barbara Windsor at a posh BBC reception (she kissed me!), and Todd Carty at the BAFTAs (I wasn't on the EastEnders table, by the way, I wangled my ticket through the Radio Times — soap writers don't get invited to award ceremonies unless they're Tony Jordan).

It was weird chatting amiably to Todd Carty. I confess I almost called him "Mark" when we were introduced (the name of his EastEnders character), proving what an easy trap that is to tumble into, soap fans. We agreed that writer and actor should probably keep a professional distance. What sort of conversations would you have?

"Loved the way you delivered 'I'll get my helmet' in ep 1149! You really got the subtext." "Thanks. Could you do me a bed scene?"

At the end of the day, you're just a writer, an interchangeable name on the front of the latest script to land on Todd Carty's doormat in a jiffy bag. He's the star, he's the one autograph hunters hang around for (or did —Mark Fowler has since been retired from the Square). If you're doing a good writing job on a soap, no one will notice.

Your agonised-over episode is just a slice of sausage.

I was eventually forced to give up writing EastEnders when I landed a job on the radio which meant my days were no longer my own.

We parted on good terms, so it's not inconceivable that one day I might return to the Square, like Ethel —albeit hopefully not to die like she did.

It remains the best job I ever had — whether my sister's friend believes I ever had it or not — but it's a blessed relief not to have to watch the programme religiously any more. Four nights a week? Who's got the time? Apart from the actor who used to play Ashley Cotton, obviously.

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