I posted on social media last week a story about a writer who was not given the credit for an idea that he had that was eventually made into a film. (Link is at the end of this article)
Sadly this is not an unusual story in the entertainment business or any business for that matter.
Everyone knows someone where they work who has an idea stolen by someone else who took all credit for it. I said that this had happened to me, in different ways and to a lesser degree certainly, but it has.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to explain what I meant by that, there are two stories to tell. One of credit being placed inappropriately, and one of pretty much outright theft of an idea.
Why am I writing this now? People seemed interested when I mentioned it, and between these two situations and other parts of life, this was the end of my writing career for many many years. Just when it was arguable that I was actually getting somewhere.
The first story was in the early ’90s, after college I had sent off several spec scripts for sitcom ideas that I had to production companies that were in the Artist and Writer’s yearbook. This is pre-internet kids, that’s what we did back then. Crazy isn’t it? Printing out and posting scripts, imagine!
This was usually a small section of a script, a scene or two, and a breakdown of the broader story idea, characters and other episode plans. I received a lot of ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ as you would expect, but also quite a few positive things. Several companies contacted me with regards to working on other projects and submitting them and so on. Then it all died down, as it often does when TV is involved.
Making any entertainment medium can be like trying to bake a cake with no recipe, no ingredients and several different people barking different instructions at you. Whilst juggling live cats.
So I was wrapped up in rewrites, and also at this time I was fairly regularly writing one-liners for topical comedy shows on Radio 4, like WeekEnding and Huddlines, so was keeping fairly busy alongside a pretty much full-time job.
One day I got a phone call out of nowhere from Nicholas Parsons. Yes, that Nicholas Parsons.
I will be honest, I said ‘Very funny Tommy!” and hung up the phone.
It rang again. I once again said that I did not believe it and put the phone down.
You see, in my defence, I had a friend who was very fond of ‘hilarious’ wind-ups, and I had no reason to expect Mr Parsons would want to contact me.
The phone rang again, and I realised that I recognised the voice from the radio and TV, it really was that Nicholas Parsons. It transpired that one of the companies that I had sent a script to me quite a while previously was his company and that he liked the idea and wanted to meet and go through the idea.
We met a couple of times, once in Scarborough and once in his flat in London and I made some changes to the script as he had asked. Why wouldn’t I? This was Nicholas Parsons, a man who had worked with some of the comedy greats, I was young and in awe. I put a lot of time into working and reworking the idea, popping the one-liner writing onto a back burner.
Clearly I didn’t need that anymore, and I simply did not have time for both. Writing topical comedy in the days before websites and email was quite a long winded process, these days anyone can read a story on Twitter and make a half arsed ‘joke’.
The entry bar used to be higher, is the democratisation and demonetisation of comedy material a good thing? Discuss.
No really, I am not going expand on that opinion here, this story is long enough by itself.
Working full time, writing a sitcom and attempting to have a normal early twenties life meant that something had to go by the wayside. Eventually, Mr P liked what I had made, but stated that he would only go further if I changed it so it was his name first, and I was put down as a co-writer. Far from happy about this, I was forced to agree as I had sunk so much time and effort into it and had seen no money at all at this point. Which is normal by the way, I was not expecting anything until it got made. That’s how TV works people, sometimes months later you get paid. I once waited over 6 months for payment for one joke. (And that is no joke.)
With Mr Parson’s name on it, and large company interest (I was assured) this was a shoe in. My first sitcom was going to be made, can you imagine how exciting this was to me?
Then nothing.
Followed by considerably more nothing, apart from non returned phone calls and non answered letters.
After considerably more nothing, I heard from someone else in the industry that Mr Parsons never had the money or the support to make the project. He was in fact, just taking it around other production companies saying that he had written it, and that he wanted to make it with their help. His star was very much on the wane by this point, so that went as well as you can expect.
The real kicker about this story? One of the other companies that I had sent the same spec script to wrote to tell me that they had seen something incredibly similar from another source. Which presumably meant that they thought that I was plagiarising the Parsons version. Which leads me to assume that my name was not on the script that he was showing to people, but I obviously have no proof of that.
That is where that story ended, never heard from him again. Now, this in itself was upsetting, but I did what a writer always has to do, brush themselves off and carry on.
I did, but with less vigour for quite some time. Eventually, I had an idea for a teenage/older children’s drama, and I wrote out the first episode in full and fleshed out a synopsis for the other episodes, and ever gave a brief breakdown of where the idea could go if it went to another series. I was really proud of the writing on this one, it was a comedy drama and I loved the way that the characters interacted with each other. I felt that some of the dialogue really crackled with life.
Again I sent this out to a handful of companies, five in total, four wrote back with positive words about the writing but they were slightly concerned about the subject matter. It was based on a group of teenagers setting up a pirate radio station, some companies felt that radio was dying (Really, that was one response I got.) and the Beeb was worried about it could be seen as encouraging children to do something illegal. I contacted them again stressing that the characters got caught for doing what they had done wrong, but that there was a positive outcome, but that was it from the BBC. I can understand that opinion, even if I didn’t agree with it.
Fair enough, I was pleased with the feedback on the whole, and I had gained some more contacts out of it.
Some months later, while working on another project (Stand up, I think) a friend rang me to tell me to watch CITV the next day, when I asked why he would not explain more but told me to record it.
So I set up the VCR, no hard drive recording here kids. I was amazed by what I saw, it was my script idea, with a new name and slightly changed character names. I do mean slightly, one of the characters changed from ‘Jack’ to ‘Jax” for example.
The difference was that they basically compressed the plan for a first series that I had sent them into the first couple of episodes, and then moved onto the outline for a second series from there on.
I am not going to lie, I cried. I was broken. I watched the whole first episode and saw that at the end the production company that made it was one of the five that I had sent my script to, and the only one that I had never heard back from. Hearing nothing from a submission was nothing unusual so, to be honest, I had thought very little about it.
I was inconsolable, and not unsurprisingly the company in question never responded to my attempts to contact them. I then engaged a specialist solicitor who read my copyrighted script, watched the video copy that I provided and managed to get a copy of the script for the show that was actually made and broadcast. (No idea how.)
They said that I had an excellent case. There was one problem, can you guess?
It’s the one thing that these stories always figure somewhere.
Money.
I was working at the time in a bowling alley earning way less than what would become minimum wage in a few years, and I was saving to rent a house and move out of the shared house that I was living in.
To take them to court I would have to pay the costs of the legal team, and copyright court cases are notoriously long winded and complicated. There was no way that I could afford to do that.
So that was that. It is an unwritten rule in showbiz that things like this will happen to you on the way to becoming successful.
Trouble was that this made me anxious and depressed, along with other things that were happening at the time, and I could not write for a very long time.
I soon started a new job in a call centre, which paid much better, and gradually I could no longer write. I sent out the odd thing here and there, but it was in name only, I knew what I was producing was not good enough so gradually that stopped too.
It’s taken years for me to write again, it has been a slow and deliberate process. Some of the things that I have been involved with over the years I am proud of, but I have not really written professionally since. Apart from the odd one liner on Radio 4 Xtra’s NewsJack, and a children’s ebook.
I am gradually writing again more and more often, but it is not always easy to write for ‘fun’ when it indirectly caused so much hurt for me.
I know that I am blaming the medium not the outcome here, but they often feel inextricably linked to me. I have since struggled with the feeling that I should be a successful writer/performer, and the feeling that I am a failure because I am not.
I work for the Civil Service now, no really. By day mild mannered civil servant, by night?
Asleep generally.
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