Article from Radio Active here https://web.archive.org/web/20200303170028/http://abctvgorehill.com.au/assets/publications/radio_active/pubs_ra1957.htm
Mr. Kerr, a former television script editor with the BBC and with two commercial TV companies, ATV and ABC in London, has spent the last eight years in writing and adapting plays. He is now writing several half-hour crime plays under the title "KILLER IN CLOSE-UP", the first of which was produced by the ABC on September 4.
Script Editors spend half their time explaining to writers the kind of play that has been found in the U.S. and U.K. peculiarly suitable for TV production, and in dissuading them from attempting the unsuitable. Their recommendations are based on a handful of elementary ‘rules’.
- The average TV audience consists of three people, one of them making tea, another stroking the cat, and the third graciously giving about half his mind to the screen. The writers’ job is to kill the tea-making, put the cat out and get these three people sitting on the edge of their seats, riveted, receptive and silent. Difficult, certainly. But you won’t do it by costume drama. In fact –
- A play about Cardinal Wolsey is unlikely to reach the TV screens at all. This goes for Joan of Arc, Bloody Mary, Henry VIII, most of his wives, Christopher Columbus and Guy Fawkes. If you must write the thing, don’t submit it. Show it to Aunt Connie instead. And if you’ve written a frolic about Income Tax remember that –
- Farce needs an audience, a mass audience. The television playwright hasn’t got one.
- TV fantasy flops. Your delicate piece about the mermaid who wants to join the Bondi Surfing Club has no television future. Television is a factual medium. The viewer has spent the afternoon watching five sets of Lew Hoad and Pancho Gonzales. In the evening he has accompanied Mr. Menzies on his tour of a new sewage works near Hobart. The viewer, a literal-minded character, believes in Hoad’s backhand cross-shot and in sewage; he doesn’t believe in the mermaid at Bondi. Who would?
- Rule five requires the playwright not to attempt pale imitations of Christopher Fry, John Osborne, Dylan Thomas, Ray Lawler; not to re-love Lucy, re-marry Joan; not to prolong life with Elizabeth or Riley or Lassie.
What then is ‘suitable’ for television? What are the special conditions of television production? What is television?
Television is not a new art-form, a new medium. It is simply a new technical means of transmission. The thing transmitted – as far as drama is concerned – is still a play, and the ancient dramatic rules remain unchanged. The dramatic essence is still telling a story, through dialogue and action, of characters in conflict with each other or with circumstance. Television is contemporary, realistic, factual, literal, ephemeral. This tends to dictate the choice of subject. The audience that is waiting to view the play is not a mob gathered together for that purpose; it is a sullen domestic group of two, perhaps three people, their listless eyes a mere five feet away from the lips of the actor. But they are curiously alert, far smarter than a theatre or cinema audience. The old stage precept ‘Tell ‘em what you’re going to do, do it, then tell’ em you’ve done it’ is splendid advice for stage writing; it’s murder on TV. If, in a stage play, the grandfather clock is a significant prop because hidden in it is a loaded revolver, the Author throughout Act I will have been busy planting that clock five or six times. It will strike. It will be fast. Mother will think of selling it…At the Act I interval the audience will know that something, perhaps the crazy nephew, is likely to emerge from that clock in Act II. On television the clock can be established by a quick cut to it on the line ‘Are we going to be late?’ – and by this cut established, solidly, for the rest of the play. It is not that the TV audience is really brighter than other audiences. But it is given its information more directly, more vividly, and all the time the camera is selecting what it is to be permitted to see.
So much for generalities. Let us now consider the practical aspects of television scripting. Although it is a relatively young industry, television has had a progeny, some of them little monsters. A producer finding himself with an unexpected success, rather than attribute this to the story and the way it has been told by the playwright, is more likely to remember what he did with his cameras – shooting through mirrors from the feet up, ‘mixing’ instead of ‘cutting’, or superimposing the credits in chi-chi lettering. The observant student of television drama in this country and in England and America will be familiar with some of the experiments that have failed, others that have succeeded.
Writers and producers through the post-war years of television have certainly had their failures, but these should have taught the writers of today some invaluable lessons. Let us try to recall some of these. Let us start, heretically, by suggesting that sound is as important on television as vision, very often more important. The words matter most of course, for they tell the story, but effects and music can give a play roots in ‘place’, in a way that grainy telecine inserts or film shots cannot.
If five people are on the screen at once, two of them are likely to be getting in the way. If twenty-0five people are in the cast of a TV play, it’s probably a sound radio script. It follows that if a play subject is talked about by a cast of seven and dramatically illustrated by three main characters, it is right for size at least.
The single domestic viewer (and his tired neighbour) will be interested in a story within his or his neighbour’s experience. His television set is not there to recapture phoney history nor to lead him tip-toeing down the garden path of fantasy. ‘Costume’ in a TV play is acceptable if it is worn by a bus-conductor, a judge, a soldier, or a cop. ‘Period’, for TV purposes, is anything before last night. ‘Plot’, on TV, doesn’t mean Guy Fawkes; it means ‘who knocked the old lady down at the crossing and drove on?’
These are dogmatic statements, and every writer is free to challenge them if he wishes. But the young writer should go cautiously. He should first establish in his own mind and for his private satisfaction what the theme of his play is to be. He should then pick a subject that is contemporary and immediately recognisable to the majority of his viewers. Let it be shop-lifting or hit-and-run or the non-union man cut dead by his mates or the Melbourne doctor’s refusal to have his own child vaccinated against polio. This situation-story will run throughout the play, but running alongside it, inter-threaded, there might well be an emotional sub-story, so that (as we subsequently find) the wife who knocked down a pedestrian and drove on, happened to be on her way to meet a man friend. But for the accident, the husband wouldn’t have known, but now…(You may recognise Waiting for Gillian. It is not difficult to make a similar story skeleton for Deep Blue Sea or Journey’s End or Asmodee or Black Chiffon).
The story counts. The way it is written will dictate the way it is shot. Writers and producers have learned this by trail and error. The good producers can be trusted to do good and faithful work on a new play. And let us make no mistake about it, the producers, however foolish some of their earlier fumblings may have seemed, are now, as a body, far more highly skilled in their own craft than are the television writers in theirs.
Writers, for some obscure reason, have been curiously contemptuous of TV. A mere handful – perhaps twenty in England, fifty in the States – have persevered, studying their own and their colleagues’ work, striving to improve. But, in fairness to Australian writers, let it be added that a TV playwright in England can live comfortably by writing plays. U.K. prices are five times the current Australian rates. In fact, the professional writer in this country can only think of Australian TV as a secondary market. When writers are offered a living wage here, from that date Australian TV can begin to look ahead. But not until then.
In what form should the apprentice-writer submit his script? Certainly not in the form of a shooting script. Don’t clutter up a good story with pseudo-technical directions. Don’s add stage directions for the actor’s benefit. If the line is ‘You filthy swine, Marmaduke!’, don’t bother to add to that in brackets (ANGRILY) or (HISSING THE WORDS THROUGH BLANCHED LIPS). Leave such decorations to the producer or actor.
There is a simple punctuation of TV which should be known to the writer. This leaves the commas to the discretion of the producer, but makes it clear to him where to put the full stop and when to start a new paragraph. A ‘cut’ is the equivalent of a full stop at the end of a sentence. A ‘dissolve’ or ‘mix’ indicates the beginning of a new paragraph. A ‘fade out’ generally suggests the end of one chapter and the start of the next. A ‘breakdown’ is a fair cow!
When the play is written, submit it. Trust the actors and the producer. Keep away from all rehearsals except the first read-through, and watch the play’s first TV production in solitude, your fingers crossed against technical break-down or actors’ camera-hogging. And think about your next play.
A word of advice about that next play; the only worthwhile advice there is: Tell a good story, and tell it well dramatically.
Planning a telecast from a Sydney wool store. From L. - Bridgland Brown's Store Manager; Producer Fred Widdows (Rural Officer); Script Asst. Prue Bavin; Commentator Bryan todd (Rural Officer); Jack Christopher, O.B. Tech. Producer; Ronay. O.B. Planning Officer.
RADIO-ACTIVE, September 16, 1957 – Pages 4 and 5
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