How did I get into screenwriting? If you don’t have time to read the whole post, it was down to luck, hard work, and The Beatles.
in 2017 I was working at NME magazine. For people outside the UK, NME was the music magazine, but like all magazines had fallen on hard times.
NME, or more accurately its parent company, Time Inc UK, was desperate to find ways to make more money and realised it owned an archive of old photos, magazines and comic books.
This long overlooked archive contained candid photos of The Beatles that hadn’t been seen since they were taken, interviews with just about every major musician in the last 100 years and thousands of old British comic books.
It was like finding Marvel in a basement. There were about a hundred different characters/worlds/storylines three floors underground in a room with no lights. Time Inc UK hatched a plan to get journalists with narrative experience to come up with pitches to see if they could generate interest in developing these stories into TV shows.
We pulled together a pitch based on Sexton Blake, arguably the most famous character in the archive. Sexton was a detective in the style of Sherlock Holmes. Over 4000 stories had been written about him, making him one of the most prolifically chronicled characters in English literature. He’d also appeared in several films and on TV.
Sexton Blake solves the Echo Murders
Our idea for a Sexton Blake TV show was mad and ambitious, but fresh enough that Time Inc UK hired the veteran screenwriter/director Eric Blakney to turn the treatment into a pilot. Eric is a legend. Among many other astonishing projects he helmed the 21 Jump Street TV series at its peak! We (Dan Stubbs, Lauren Midwinter and I) got an intensive course in screenwriting while throwing ideas for the pilot at Eric.
The Sexton pilot was sent out, and while we were waiting, I went into the archives to look for something I could write on my own. The Trigan Empire caught my eye. Trigan was a bombastic adventure series about an imagined Roman Empire in space. It was full of amazing monsters, court intrigue and wild atomic age machinery. It had been huge in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.
Cover of The Trigan Empire, Volume 1 by Mike Butterworth and Don Laurence.
I locked myself in the archives and I read every page that existed about Trigan. Then I sat down and started writing.
A week later we had a pilot. It was a family adventure series with court intrigue, alien monsters and surprisingly accurate depictions of Roman life. The noted Roman Historian, Dr Emma Southon, provided an incredible amount of detail and happily answered silly questions.
The Trigan Empire pilot got into the hands of the lovely people at Ridley Scott Associates, who liked it enough to show it to Starz and more importantly get their rising star director, Sam Yates, on board for the pilot. At the time Sam was the red hot stage director, and was looking to move into TV/film. He has since directed the excellent Magpie written by Tom Bateman and starring Daisy Ridley.
Emboldened by the attention the Trigan pilot was getting, I wrote the rest of the first series. This was nine 60-minute episodes, each involving multiple drafts with notes from the producer Jason Bick and from Anna Silver, who had been brought in as script editor.
Nine weeks later we had a first season of the show, and everyone who read it wanted to champion the project and help push it forward. It was a thrilling time. We got concept drawings done by Chris Weston, who trained under the original artist for the Trigan comic book, Don Lawrence. My favourite was the one he did of the opening page, which is below.
A roman on a motorbike rides towards an Eagle shaped space ship.
More and more impressive people joined the project but sadly the financial pressures that made Time Inc UK investigate the archive ultimately caused the company to sell it wholesale.
The new owners weren’t interested in our work on Trigan Empire, despite the package we had put together. It made me pretty cross at the time, but now I understand that that is showbusiness.
The lift to the archives, with the lights off.
Despite my disappointment that it wasn’t being made, the script made some important people aware of my work. Because of Trigan I got to work on The Ambush for Ridley Scott Associates, and then while flying out to the premiere in Norway I started sketching out some ideas for a very different crew, on a very different boat, that would ultimately become The Narrows.
If I had been cooler, I would have stolen some of the photos from the archive. My favourite set was of The Beatles between takes recording a show with Cilla Black. I think it must have been early on in their career because they were still in suits with neat haircuts. The stage was bright blue and the boys were all just chilling and smoking cigarettes, but also it was clear they didn’t like Cilla very much. You could read so much into their body language.
I really wish I’d stolen it.