Julie Gardner on Drama
10 Jul 08
BBC Wales head of drama Julie Gardner told her student audience that she had been “obsessed by telly” since she was a child. Despite enjoying her work as a lecturer at a college of further education in south Wales, the pull of TV proved too strong, leading Gardner to the BBC, where she worked as a producer’s secretary in the mid-1990s on Peter Flannery’s RTS award-winning drama, Our Friends in the North.
“I was a bit of a disaster and the associate producer kept trying to fire me,” Gardner recalled. But she stuck at it and her TV career began to follow a well-worn BBC path: from script reader to script editor to producer.
Gardner reckoned she had been “over-promoted” to her first producer role on Sunburn, a short-lived BBC1 series about holiday reps starring Michelle Collins. Nevertheless, she managed to land a job at LWT as co-producer on Andrew Davies’s multi-award-winning version of Othello for ITV in 2001, which lifted the play’s plot and characters and dropped them into the modern setting of London’s Metropolitan Police.
It seemed as if Gardner’s career was taking off, until she produced a Robson Green vehicle, Me and Mrs Jones, which was not shown on UK television, although it did get a US airing. Gardner recalled the experience as “really bloody awful”.
Her fortunes changed after she spent “a bored afternoon thumbing through an English dictionary for titles” and came up with the idea for a drama about the legendary lover Casanova. At which point another writer called Davies – Russell T who had made his name with Channel 4 series Queer As Folk – came into Gardner’s working life.
Gardner had met and clicked with Davies at the South Bank Show Awards. She approached him with her Casanova idea, he liked it and wrote a draft. Reading Davies’s scripts, says Gardner, was “without question the turning point for me and my thinking about drama – they were amazing. It was extraordinary to start a relationship with Russell. Everything about the man and the way he talks about drama and TV is completely inspiring and magical.”
Casanova starts a long-term relationship
Sky factual entertainment and specialist factual commissioning editor Emma Read, who was chairing this RTS Masterclass, asked Gardner to talk more about her relationship with writers.
“It’s the single most important thing,” she replied. “It’s the relationship with the writer that ordinarily kickstarts your career as a producer because everyone is looking for a title. Without writers we’d be off air; it’s that basic.”
Gardner could not persuade ITV to commission Casanova, but in 2003 she moved to BBC Wales as head of drama. Casanova subsequently aired as a three-part series on both BBC3 and BBC1 in 2005. Casanova, of course, was only the beginning of Gardner’s working relationship with Davies; next came his regeneration of Doctor Who for BBC1.
“When we were starting to cast, the tabloids were suggesting people like Paul Daniels to play the doctor,” she recalled. “We realised that this was a title that had come to mean light entertainment and nostalgia, so we needed a really serious, good actor to stop that and say: ‘This is full-blooded drama and you’re going to bloody well take it seriously.’”
Christopher Eccleston, the Iago character in Othello, was cast as the time lord, won rave reviews but left after one series. Davies and Gardner turned to David Tennant, who had played Casanova, and Doctor Who has gone from strength to strength.
Next came the spin-offs – Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures – which Gardner said “were about Russell and I being greedy and wanting more. Torchwood was born as a post-watershed answer to Doctor Who and then we thought Sarah Jane could be the kids’ version. We’ve got all the demographics covered.”
As well as producing the inhouse Doctor Who titles, Gardner’s role also includes commissioning from the independent sector. Her biggest success has been Kudos Film and Television’s back-to-the-1970s drama, Life on Mars. “It was a big genre piece with a twist,” said Gardner, which has also been highly influential: “More and more series are becoming very colourful and using big, bold concepts at their heart.”
Gardner is handing over responsibility for Doctor Who to Piers Wenger, who will also become the new head of drama at BBC Wales. She will continue to executive produce the current series and the Doctor Who specials to be broadcast during 2009.
“So, what’s next for you,?” asked Read. “Much more Doctor Who and maybe a holiday, but beyond that I’m not sure.” replied Gardner, who was giving nothing away.
Julie Gardner on…
The hard grind of the job:
‘You have to love the work. If you don’t love it, please don’t bother; it’s too hard… you have to be prepared to work in an unglamorous sometimes quite miserable way. You [will be] freelance, working on very short contracts, having to move home from where you live at a drop of a hat, having to stand in fields at six in the morning… What you should be thinking about is your lifestyle – is that how you want to live? If it is, it’s the best job in the world.’
Producing:
‘You get to work with people, frankly, who are cleverer than you on the best shows. For me, being in a room with Russell T Davies is the best thing ever… If you’re the producer, you’re not the talent. That’s quite a hard lesson [to learn] sometimes. You are the facilitator. That’s not to underestimate what my producers do – they’re absolutely vital and creative, brilliant people – but they are there to push forward the writer, the director and the cast… When I’m the cleverest person in the room and doing the most talking I know that show has got difficulties.’
Selling programmes abroad:
‘Your primary objective is to serve the domestic market… [but now] we’re in a phase of bold drama pieces – like Hustle, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes – that can travel. Largely, for the funding models to work, you’ve got to have some co-production money… Doing Doctor Who and Torchwood in 13-part runs is much better suited to the US because they get a whole season to air.’
The role of script editor:
‘It’s one of huge influence but not power. You’re there chipping in [with advice] but if you make the wrong script notes, you can destroy shows. It’s a brilliant role; I loved being a script editor.’
Choosing directors:
‘I’ve given breaks to directors on local output and then they’ve maybe moved to The Sarah Jane Adventures where it’s a very defined schedule: it’s five-day weeks, we’re working children’s hours and we can’t do many night shifts. There’s a safety net there. Then they might go on to Torchwood, which is a bit more chaotic, and then maybe Doctor Who where the pressure, the stakes and the planning are enormous.’
[Julie Gardner is head of drama, BBC Wales, and previously worked at LWT, where she produced dramas including Me and Mrs Jones and a multi-award-winning modern version of Othello. The session was chaired by Emma Read, commissioning editor, Sky One, Two and Three.]
