Author Phil Ford has been writing television for almost fifteen years, with such credits as Coronation Street, Bad Girls, Taggart, and New Captain Scarlett to his name. He is currently the head writer and co-producer of the Doctor Who spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures, and aside from Russell T Davies he is to date the only writer to have contributed to all three Doctor Who shared-universe series: Doctor Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures. On 28 November, 2009, this Examiner sat down to speak with Phil about his career and his life-long dream to work in Doctor Who.
Chris: Thank you, Phil, for joining me today. I’m very excited to speak with you.
Phil: Thanks, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Chris: To start, let’s talk about you. Growing up, were you always interested in becoming a writer and did your education play any part in this desire?
Phil: Definitely. I found out very early on that writing was the only thing I was ever any good at. It was around age eleven, when I was in junior school, that I discovered I could write and my love for writing shaped my education and then my career. I grew up in a small mining town where the thought of going to work in television or doing any sort of writing was utterly bizarre – it really was not a thing to do. So it seemed that the only way someone like me could make a living was to become a journalist. I had a placement to go to the University of Sheffield to study English, but in the end I didn’t go and instead I started training as a journalist. I did journalism for about ten years and during that period I took a side road into advertising and public relations. Then around 1994 I started seriously thinking about writing for television.
Chris: And how did your television writing career begin?
Phil: Well, in 1994 I got myself an agent and I began the process of writing various speculative scripts, which my agent then took to broadcasters in the hope of finding the right producers who would want to take me on and use my scripts. My first commission was in 1996 for the series Taggart. It took a year to write that series; and while I was writing it I was also taken on to write for 'Corrie' [Coronation Street] to do their Christmas 1997 episode. I stayed with 'Corrie' for five years and I wrote about eighty-six episodes for them. But I first started with Taggart, which was a three hour story, or three sixty-minute episodes, and that series came out the week after my first 'Corrie' episode. One interesting series I wrote for in 2006 that’s actually never been shown in the UK was Bombshell. That was a TV series about the British army; I wrote one episode for that.
Chris: Do you know why the series was never broadcast?
Phil: I don’t know why exactly, but I suspect since it was produced before the military landscape changed and it all blew up in Afghanistan and Iraq that the show was no longer seen as relevant. Whatever the reason, it was a shame; it was a good series from the scripts that I saw.
Chris: Let’s talk about scriptwriting. As a writer, how much creative input did you have in crafting the storylines for those series?
Phil: Writing input really varies on television. Partly it depends on your workload and in an ideal world once you’ve finished one thing you’re busy writing something else. But it really depends on the series. For example, Bombshell was heavily storylined by the creators, so there wasn’t so much input the writers could give. You could add some ideas, but not nearly as much as is possible with The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood, or even Doctor Who.
But really the input level changes from show to show. I’ll give you another example: 'Corrie' had a team of fifteen writers and we came together every two weeks to thrash out storylines amongst ourselves. For other series like Bad Girls and Bombshell, the stories were worked out by the creators and the storyliners, and the writers would then come in and, putting it crudely, ‘make the storylines work.’ That doesn’t sound very charitable to them, but really what the writers do is just add the mechanics.
Chris: Do you, as a writer, ever wish that your viewers knew more about what you add to the story?
Phil: No, not really. Television is by nature a collaborative process with lots of people working together. And that’s why I appreciate the whole process, because at the end of the day the people watching television just want to enjoy it, and if people do then it’s paid off and our job is done. I don’t want people to see the joints of it, because if they do then you’ve failed. It’s all dreamworks, television, which has the same purpose as film: to take people away. So it doesn’t bother me not to be known by the audience as a writer. On the other hand, I wish people would notice who the writers are more, since the writers tend to be the ones who write an episode.
Chris: Looking back on your writing career until now, do you have a particular series for which you have especially fond memories? Do you have a favorite episode that you wrote?
Phil: I had a great time working on Bad Girls, which grew out of 'Corrie.' A lot of TV is not what you know but who you know, and the same people who helped me get onto 'Corrie' then set up their own production company called Shed; and they invited me to do Bad Girls. I think my favorite episode that I wrote was the very final episode of Bad Girls, although we didn’t know it was the last until we were producing it. Another favorite series I took part in was New Captain Scarlet, which was a CGI version of the Gerry Anderson story I grew up with. I wrote most of the episodes for that one. Writing for New Captain Scarlet was really fun for me because before that time most of my work was in 'Corrie,' a soap involving fairly stylized but realistic stories. To go from that genre to sci-fi was marvelous, since those were the kinds of shows I always wanted to make. More importantly, working on New Captain Scarlet very much helped me to do what I do now.
Stay close for the second part of the Examiner's exclusive interview with Phil Ford.
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