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Making the characters believable - Radio Times, October 2007 |
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Writers Zinnie Harris and Ben Richards let Benji Wilson in on a few scriptwriting secrets.
How to create a spook
"There are people who
help us with psychological profiling. There's also a lot of literature that
they give you when you first join the team
- reports, official stuff, journals that talk
about people who work under cover -
so there's proper research for small
psychological insights. But it's quite
dry - you have to turn it into
flesh and bones." Zinnie Harris
"We asked ourselves,
'What would a spook
be like?' very much at the preliminary stage. We talked to advisers about
what the spooks' attitude to danger was and how
they approached things. They [MI5] want to
recruit people who don't stand out, who are quiet,
non-ideological.
"Our task as writers is to try to
address that, while at the same time creating
characters that viewers are going to want to watch
on screen. Some of the people who did go on to
be recruited [to MI5] from my college at Oxford,
I wouldn't want to be watching on TV." Ben Richards
"Often the new spook will be dictated by whose
shoes they're coming in to fill. I killed Danny
[David Oyelowo]. So we needed someone of his
age, a younger male who wasn't so high up the
hierarchy.
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"What was interesting about Zafar was
that he came in when the 'war on terrorism' was
most in the public eye, and obviously we needed
to address that and obviously the thing that MI5
would want more than anything else
would be an agent from his
community. So we had to
give him background:
what does he think
about this? He's had a Muslim upbringing. So
why has he come to this decision?" Ben Richards
Finding material for storylines
"As you start to write the
spook, you'll be at
a party and you just happen to be talking to an
international human-rights lawyer and someone
starts to tell you a tale about someone they're
defending and you think, 'That's a really
interesting little nugget of an idea that might go
into an episode…'
"I sort of make a beeline for
anyone who says they work for the Foreign Office.
There was a mathematician I met the other day
who said there's a secret mathematics centre
somewhere and I thought, 'Aha!'"
Zinnie Harris
Killing off characters
"Bumping off is my speciality. More often than not it's because an actor is going.
We get irate letters protesting, but most of the time
we don't want them to go. It's harder to establish a
character than kill them. Every actor wants a good
sendoff; they want to go out all guns blazing.
"For
a writer the sendoff is usually pure drama and
anyone who can't enjoy that moment and the
tension of it is probably in the wrong job. I think
it's unfair that Spooks has a reputation for killing
off characters - we don't do it as much as
people say. But we do do it…" Ben Richards
Fan reaction
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"When Ruth, who was everybody's
favourite, left, the storyline was that she'd gone
off round the world. Somebody kept sending
postcards to the production office from different
places in the world, from her and addressed to
Harry. That was somebody having a laugh, but
we get a clear sense from the audience of what
they like and what they don't." Ben Richards
**
Now take a look at our full Spooks guide.
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