Authors' Matters by ALCS
Authors' Matters is a podcast by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) where we talk to writers from across the profession about how they earn their living, or at least try to. From copyright to contracts, we’ll also talk about issues that make the writing living easier or more difficult.
Authors' Matters by ALCS
Season 4 episode 6: Gwyneth Hughes
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Writer of the ITV hit series Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Gwyneth Hughes joins Authors' Matters to discuss how her beginnings as a journalist informed her writing and gave her an early instinct for real people's stories. She also shares her insights on how to write fiction successfully for the screen and how the ecosystem of TV writing has changed during the age of streaming.
Welcome to Authors Matters, a podcast from the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society. I'm Caroline Sanderson, and I'm a writer and books journalist. In this episode of Authors Matters, we talk to Gwynneth Hughes. Gwynne is a screenwriter for film and TV. Her credits include Vanity Fair, Miss Austen Regrets, and the more recent and much-watched Mr. Bates versus the Post Office with Toby Jones in the title role. Gwynne's work has won her several Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards, and she's also been nominated at both the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes. Gwyn, welcome to Authors Matters. I believe you had a slightly unusual route into TV script writing via journalism and news journalism in particular.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I started out as a newspaper reporter on a local paper, now sadly long gone, called the Sheffield Telegraph, which was the most enormous fun, especially for a southern girl like me. I mean it was fantastic to get on the train from St. Pancras. And I'd never even lived north of the River Thames. So that was a real oh wow, big experience. And um although I didn't stay in print journalism very long, it did it did teach me a lot of stuff that you know I still I still do, I still use. I mean, it looks like my career fell into these two huge different halves, but I don't really see it that way. You know, I still go out and talk to people and write down what they say in my notebook and then um turn it into something. It's just the something is now rather different to what it was before.
SPEAKER_00That's really interesting, isn't it? Because that um how that sort of journalistic instinct that you were honing, did you have quite a traditional apprenticeship and training? Was that the kind of underpinning for it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a long time ago. So yeah, it was pretty traditional. It was even it was called indentures, you know, just like in the print in the sort of 16th century or something. Not much more modern than that. So yeah, you know, going to court, going to council meetings, going to road accidents, going to trials, murders, you know, you name it. We did it, golden weddings, you know, learning to um learning to find learning to look at the chaos of everyday life and find where the story is. You know, that's really all I still do.
SPEAKER_00Because even in your TV dramas, there's very often a a real true story at the heart of them, isn't there? So you can, it's a you're you're right, you can see the kind of connections that run that run through it. So, how did you move from journalism into television and I think news TV initially and and factual TV?
SPEAKER_01I just got a job at Yorkshire Television in the newsroom. So it wasn't a big move, it was technically very different, you know, cameras and such, and film cameras in those days. I'm a very old lady now. Um, but it was just the same skills, really. You know, it's the same thing, it the things are happening, things are chaotic and mad, and they're happening to people, and your job is to go out and find out what those things are and write them up or deliver them to camera in a way that makes some sense and try to get it right. You know, same thing really, just slightly different technology, and also an enormous amount of fun, just the same as the newspaper would be in.
SPEAKER_00It's different medium. And then I think you became a director of documentaries with um uh specializing in true crime and history.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I did. I mean, that's again was kind of natural progression, really. From I'd learned how to, you know, write scripts for camera and how to um how to lumber about the world with huge lighting gear and you know, van full of crew members, and how much longer that took than just you and your notebook. Um, and as it was really just a kind of quite simple series of promotions that took me to working documentaries again, just the same, just longer, deeper, you know, but the same. Same thing, notebook, person, ask questions, write down their answers. And I went freelance at that stage and uh and off I went to make documentaries, which yes were largely true crime, uh, which is very, you know, journalistic, hackery, and also history, because that's my big passion in life, secret passion. If I can ever get any history to do, I jump at it. And um so we did a couple of really big series of of historical programmes. Um and then I I just I do know what I'd always I'd always wanted to be a writer, but you know, I thought I mean a writer of fiction, but I kind of thought that people like me didn't do that. You know, I don't come from posh people, and um I didn't know how you even did that, you know, where's the door you opened to get into that world? And I was approaching 30 and thought, I've got to do it now. I just can't can't make any more excuses. And I wrote a little short story, I mean a daft little short story, and I sent it off to Radio 4, and blamey, you know, they bought it, paid me £72, and don't think I even cashed it.
unknownSo exactly.
SPEAKER_01And um and they read my story out on the radio. And when I look back, it seems like, oh, magic doors open. Of course, it wasn't really like that at all. Um, but but yeah, I came in through through radio stories.
SPEAKER_00But a moment of daring, I suppose, in a way, to think of yourself as a different kind of writer and and sending that story off. There's there's quite often a moment in writers' careers where they've they've kind of dared to do something to open doors for themselves. So it's quite interesting.
SPEAKER_01I think that's right. I think you do have to, you know, sadly, you do have to do it for yourself. You just have to pluck up the courage and go for it. And it didn't even really feel that courage because I was so desperate to do it, I wanted it so much. Um, and I don't know, I just wanted to make instead of reporting a world, make a world, you know, create a world. It's a tiny world, the story's 13 minutes long, but still it was mine, and um and yeah, then I was kind of away, that's what I wanted to do. And for as for a long time I kept both things going, because I literally obviously couldn't live on £72 uh for a short story, uh, forever. So I carried on working in factual programmes, making documentaries, and alongside that trying to build a career in drama. And you know, I'm making it sound easy now, but that first drama, the first thing I wrote was uh an episode of The Bill. You remember when the bill was like little short things, 24 minutes they were. I do. And they were so difficult, like little morality tale, like a little thing with a beginning, middle, and end. And um it all had to tie up and it all had to I also think it took me a year to write the first one. They were so hard. But you know, wow, what a training, really. That was fantastic.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna ask, because those those dramas are often um those regular dramas like like the bill. I mean, my husband did a bit of acting and he got his very first role on the bill, and I think that's true for a lot of actors as well. But amazing training ground. And something else that strikes me, thinking about your journalistic background is um I think I saw an interview where you're talking about how few words you have, actually, compared with writing a book or other forms of writing where you sit there on your own and you can use as many or as few words as you want. Actually, the the parameters are very, very tight, aren't they, in drama? And as you say, writing a very self-contained but short episode of the bill. I mean, that really, really hones your instinct for the words you need to use and how few of them, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how short these things are, how long they take to do, and how short they are. I mean, it's a long time since I did a word count for somebody asking this question years ago, and I think it came out of 24,000 words for an hour. I might have got that wrong, but I think that's what it was. And that's when you think like a novel is I don't know, 200,000 or something. War and peace? Three or four seven million? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it's very, very tight, and it only works if it's full of story and gallops along, and um, you know, even the moments of calm are actually serving a galloping story. That's I think the real difference between writing fiction for the screen successfully and writing for the page. You know, the page you can luxuriate, you can kind of think about it, you can make up a tea, come back, it's still in the same place. On tele, it's got to motor. And I think you know, that's the thing that people find hardest to learn is how to keep that page turning, how not how to stop people getting up and putting the kettle on, you know, with loads and loads of stories. Such a hungry medium. That's what makes it hard, I think, hard to make the transfer into.
SPEAKER_00Yes, but I guess as that thing in common that all your writing to date had had, and also that early instinct, I guess, for for real stories, for real people's stories, and whether that's sort of fictionalised or dramatised, it's still there at the heart of what you're doing, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it is, and that's even true when they're dead, and um long dead. I mean, I wrote a film some years ago which I loved doing, it was called Miss Austen Regrets, and it was about Jane Austen's love life. She did have one. You can watch the film, you'll find out about it. Um, and Jane is long dead. I mean, you know, who cares what I think about her, what I say about her. I felt she was on my shoulder, I felt that she was, you know, that I had to do right by her, that I owed it to her. She's a much greater genius than I'll ever be, and I needed to get it right. And I I feel that with it's it's it's sad really, it's sort of obedient little girl territory in a way, isn't it? But I want it to be if I say it's a true story, it better had be a true story. Don't muck about with it. If you don't want to write a true story, don't write something else. But you know, Jane's story had to be right, and um Mr. Bates, you know, it had to be right. Because oh, I don't know why, because just because it matters to me that it is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Do you tend to, I mean, you've got a such a varied CV of credits now when you look at it, the the variety there is amazing. Do you tend to take on projects that feel within your sort of sphere of interest, or are you always trying to kind of push out of a zone of being, I don't know, kind of typecast in terms of what you take on?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I have done, I have tended to do a lot of true stories because, oh, you know, that's I get excited by them, that's actual, it's real, it's sort of important, it matters. And also, you know people are gonna watch because people love true stories. But I've also done a lot of history because I like to go back and inhabit those worlds that are so different from ours. The one thing I never write, I've never written, I wouldn't even try is science fiction. And you know what? It's my favourite thing to watch. I never watch things like the ones I write. I watch the most rubbish science fiction you can imagine. That's all I know.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. So complete change in your own in your own viewing. So, what are the things that you do you think have really helped you in your career? As you said, you didn't have kind of any contacts in the industry, you were starting very much from scratch. Um, what are what are the things that have sort of helped you through? Um, I mean, one could mention maybe awards here and nominations and things like that that I mean must be kind of a great boost and feel very encouraging. But I I often wonder what long-term help they are.
SPEAKER_01I haven't done that well in the awards and nominations thing, really. I mean, other writers have done much better than me. I'm a great runner-up, great bridesmaid. Yeah, I think over the long term, I think I just I'm quite reliable. If I say I'll do it, I'll do it. You know, and in a mad, you know, show business environment, that's maybe more rare than it should be. I'm good at these particular things that I do. And the true story thing is very challenging, and um, it's really important that whoever takes on a story not only gets it right, doesn't upset the contributors, knows how to get on with people. And not all writers, I mean, some of the most brilliant writers just stay at home in their attic and can't get on with people at all. You know, that's much more what you might associate with the kind of ideal writer is someone who lives a very lonely life in a in a garret. I do that when I'm writing, but leading up to that, I'm very happy to walk up someone's front door. I've never met bang on it with get out my notebook. I mean, it's what I've done all my working life. So I know how to do that, and I and I'm not faced by it. Every time you do it, you have to reinvent the wheel. There's no pattern, you know, they're not the same, they're all different. Every time there's some massive mountain of material that makes no sense at all that somehow you've got to, you know, charge your way through. You know, because you know in your own life, right? I mean, it's circular. You go around and make all the same mistakes over and over again. You think you're right, it goes round and round. Stories aren't like that. I mean, that's why we have them, they're the opposite of that. Stories are organised, they go beginning, middle, end. I want, I get, I I die, I live. The end. Um, and because our own lives are not like that at all, that's why we love stories. But if you're trying to put uh someone's real life into a story that is going to have an end that's going to be kind of marvellous and satisfying, and you know, people are gonna love it, well, you're doing something very brutal and weird to the real life. And I think I have a huge sense of that, huge overwhelming, big black cloud sense of my responsibility in in walking into this arena where I'm taking something, a life, that is naturally chaotic and meaning-free, and turning it into a narrative, which is the opposite. Yeah, it's uh it's a big deal, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's so interesting, and the ins instinct for that, and what you were describing as something almost investigative. And then, yeah, I guess as writers, we're we're trying to find the story, we're trying to find what's interesting for other people and what will, as you said before, you know, grip them and stop them getting up to make a cup of tea. We all want to do that. I was wondering because there are so many channels now competing for our viewing time, I wondered what what this has done to the sort of ecosystem for writers in television, whether it's created more opportunities or in a way has made it more challenging.
SPEAKER_01It ought to have made loads more opportunities, didn't it? It ought to mean that it's much easier for young people to get in. I am not an expert on this, but I have the strong feeling that it's done the opposite. The um the schedules and the budgets that we now have to work to are so fierce that I don't know how beginners can, you know, someone really reliable has to be hired to direct them, to shoot them, to write them. You haven't really got the luxury to hang about and wait for people to learn their trade. I I don't I have no idea how that happens now. Yeah, I think it's it's quite problematic. And there's something else weird going on in the industry, which is that everybody's out of work. You know, there are no production going on. There's people, you know, you hear about crews delivering pizzas, and um the one part of it that seems to be still active is development. So all the production companies have got uh I mean, I don't know how it works. I think they may have separate budgets for development, which means they're still bringing people like me up and asking us to write scripts, but you don't know if they'll ever get made, because the difference between development and production, always large financially, is now enormous. So things are more and more getting written and disappearing, and I really don't want to do that. It's incredibly frustrating, you know. If you agonise and sort of kill yourself to write something and it doesn't get made for no reason that you can discern except the way things are. And I've just really noticed just recently that people are still winging me up with work, and I'm sure then they'll forget how are they going to make these things? The Americans are not funding British stuff anymore. So sorry, it's a rambling answer, but I I do I do worry that the proliferation of channels and streamers and whatnot hasn't actually helped lower the um entry point for for young people at all.
SPEAKER_00And a challenging landscape, and um, you know, what you were saying before about shows like you know The Bill and I think Silent Witness, which you also wrote for, you know, these regular shows that need an intake of writers. It's almost where you hone your instincts for writing for TV. And I've heard from other writers they're just not there anymore. So it does sound does sound challenging. ALCS is uh talking, consulting a lot about uh AI at the moment, um specifically large language models like chat GPT. I wondered if you had any thoughts about the the threats to TV writers from AI. I mean it always feels from the outside like a very collaborative and human business, which wouldn't be a natural place for AI to come in. But I don't um maybe in early developments of scripts, I I don't know, and rewrites and things.
SPEAKER_01I can absolutely see it coming in on the early, um, the early development of scripts, yeah. And the big shows, um, you know, East Enders, Coronation Street, the casualty, these kind of really big shows, they operate on a massive storylining model. As I'm sure you know, there were a whole bunch of people in a room creating the storylines that go on across a whole year, platting them, developing them, and then handing them out to the writers to flesh out and dramatize. And that's an obvious way in for those very clever AI models, isn't it? And you'd give it to the human beings to make it human. The the actual you know, what what computers are good for, making patterns, you know, sort of uh simplifying the complicated. I can absolutely what it would cost you to develop the software that would do that properly, you might as well just use humans, actually, probably, but yeah. I mean, in every other new technology, it's just like got added on, bolted on to the old technology, hasn't it? We still read books, you know, paper ones. Um, and maybe they'll try it, people find different ways to use it. I'll be long gone by then, I think. Anyway, I mean half of what's on the telly sounds like it's been written by anyone.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it would be nice to think that all those things were going to exist in parallel and it wasn't going to threaten the the livelihoods of writers, because I mean it's difficult enough to to make a living as a writer as it is.
SPEAKER_01But uh you might end up just doing the fun stuff like making um I don't know, making the dialogue, which is the fun stuff, and and just honestly, dialogue is just like two percent of the job, but it's a fun bit, you know, the spit you sprinkle across the top, the jokes and the gags and the love scenes and whatnot, all the fun stuff. It I don't know what AI could really come up with great lines. It's hard to imagine, isn't it? But that is the easy stuff rather than the rest of it.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't seem easy to me as a kind of um pro prose writer, I must say. I'm not gonna ask you how old you are, um, Gwyn, but I know that you've your writing career, uh, you've had a long writing and successful and varied writing career in in TV. I wonder if you wanted to say something about the the value of sort of life experience in terms of what you bring to your writing for television.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well the great thing about being a writer is that um you never stop accruing more experience that you can use in your in your writing. Um these days I'm a grandma, you know, I didn't used to be a grandma. Um that's a whole new bunch of stuff, a whole new bunch of children to see the world, you know, through the eyes off and so on. And so, yeah, I mean I think uh I would think this, wouldn't I? That diversity must include age. And um I don't know any I really I don't think I know any writers who give up, um give up voluntarily. I mean maybe the phone stops ringing or whatever, or you just can't stand it anymore and you'd rather go on a cruise, whatever. But you know, Andrew Davis, gosh, he's 86 or something and still working and good on him. So yeah, I mean there's a whole load of us old farts blocking the traffic for younger people, I guess. But I do think, for instance, with Mr. Bates, I have this definite feeling that when I went up and banged on the doors of those poor people who'd got involved in that terrible thing, um, when they opened the door and saw me, they were thrilled to see someone their own age, someone that they could feel not judged by, not misunderstood by. And our relationships all got off to a you know fantastically easy start, and we were all great friends, and I think that my age has something to do with that. So there had to be an upside to get an older one there it is. I probably end up doing things about old people forever now.
SPEAKER_00I do like that, that that feeling that yes, it's a it's a job that's very hard to retire from, and that's a that's a great thing one can say about it. So if you were to give any advice to anybody who thinks I would love to do what what you do, I would love to write for television. What would it be? I mean, maybe one way to think about that is if you were talking to your younger self, what would you say?
SPEAKER_01Uh I would say hang in there, keep trying. I'd also say don't write for yourself. You know, you want to write for yourself, go in a corner and be a poet. You want people to pay you to write for them? Think about the audience. Never stop thinking about the audience, think about who they are in the broadest sense. Think about the people who are nothing like you because they're old or abroad or children or you know, a different ethnicity, anything. Think about the audience in the broadest possible way and go for pleasing and challenging and entertaining them, and never forget that you're an entertainer and it's a sacred duty. And you can bring in the sad stuff and the miserable stuff, and you can do what you like, the planets, the vampires, all that stuff I like. But all it's really about is a sacred duty to entertain. Don't get too up yourself, really.
SPEAKER_00That's stellar advice. Gwynne, Gwyneth Hughes, thank you so much. We aim to reflect the views of a wide variety of authors on our podcast, but their views are, of course, their own. Check out more episodes of Authors Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, and please join us next time. Goodbye.