Hi gang, Phig Billy here with a round-up of day two’s action at the Cheltenham Screen Writers Festival.

I attended an interesting panel discussion on the emergence of a new creative force in British television: the Show Runner!

The Show Runner is an idea which has been seen as instrumental to the success of long-running American shows such as Lost, and therefore has been targeted for assimilation by the British industry. Essentially, the show runner is the creator of a show who then becomes a writer-producer involved in every area of that show’s development. Why is this desirable?

Primarily, it allows for greater authorial control, therefore more consistent character development, better plotting and more scope for developing over-arching storylines. Although s/he probably will not write every episode, s/he will work in close consultation with the writers and may in fact re-write their scripts. I enjoy the comparison with a painting school in Renaissance Italy where apprentices actually did a fair proportion of the brushwork, but according to the philosophy of and under the guidance of the school’s master artist. I guess the other side of this is the powermonger TV controller satirised by Ed Harris as Christof in the Truman Show.

The role can already be seen appearing in British TV. Indeed, today’s panel included Barbara Machin, who although not the creator, worked as a kind of show runner on Casualty, and Tony Jordan, show runner on Hustle, and the best example of an American-style show runner at work in British TV is Russell T Davies (and his phenomenally successful resurrection of Doctor Who).

However, the panelists were keen to point out that Davies is really unique in his degree of involvement in a series, and that the American model is not really appropriate to Britain.

It would seem that the emergent British show runner works more as a guardian of a series and its creative controller, and less of a producer than the American counterpart. But regardless of the manner in which the show runner manifests itself this side of the pond, the panel concluded that if it raises the profile and authority of writers, and allows for more effective collaboration with and schooling of jobbing under-writers, then it can be a very positive force.

• stay tooned for more!

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Has this information been useful?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Festivals/Events . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.