So You Want to Be An EastEnders Script Writer?
Zeddy Lawrence Tells What It's Like
By Larry Jaffee
Zeddy Lawrence was hired by EastEnders a few years ago to inject some humour into the programme for three episodes that aired in the U.K. in 1995 and 1996. In retrospect, he's not sure that he succeeded, he admits.
"I was a sitcom writer and somebody at EastEnders saw some of my comedy-drama stuff and invited me aboard. It was a time they were trying to make it more lighthearted."
At the time, "Gita" was having an affair with "Guppy" while her husband Sanjay was back in India attending to family business. "At the end of the day, I'm not sure the storylines were that humourous. That one [Gita's affair with Guppy] was depressing."
Another storyline at the time dealt with "Ted Hills" and his two teenagers moving into the Square.
Lawrence worked a bit on the plot development of daughter Sarah becoming a kleptomaniac, which didn't last very long nor was that very funny, he remembers.
"'Tiffany' hadn't been on very long. They were toying with making her a prostitute rather than just a 'good-time' girl. She was going to sleep with businessmen for money. They decided to not go down that path and just make her a lovely young girl," Lawrence reveals, putting his brain in rewind to come up with another story that he worked on.
"It's all coming back to me-I haven't thought about it in years. My favourite bits that I wrote was 'David Wicks' when he was trying to get back with 'Carol Jackson.' And then David started having feelings about 'Bianca' [Carol and David's daughter]."
Lawrence notes the issue was based on social reality. "Something like 30 percent of people in that situation [fathers who were separated following their daughters' births] are sexually attracted [to their offspring] when they meet later in life. So we went down that line of David fancying his daughter. But there wasn't much humour there [either] to get into really," he admits.
Lawrence points out that while it might not always have been funny, it was a pleasure writing for Michael French, who played David.
"Everyone [at EastEnders] loved writing for him. I think the show goes through stages at which one character dominates the show. At that time, it was him [David]. More recently it has been 'Grant.' David was a good one to write for.
Besides EastEnders, Lawrence through the 1990s was also regularly writing TV scripts for various British television series, including a sitcom called The House of Windsor for Granada. His soap credits include: Byker Grove; London Bridge; The Dream Team for Sky Television, which co-starred Brian Croucher ("Ted Hills" on EastEnders); and Family Affairs on Channel 5.
He's currently employed by a Web site called TotallyJewish.com, for which he has conceived a comical Jewish cyber-soap called BaruchSide (a takeoff on popular U.K. soap Brookside), as a photo story with six new photos running three times a week. It was his idea to put a photo of "Grant Mitchell" up on the site to gain attention for the new feature.
Lawrence provided a glimpse of behind-the-scenes of what it's like to be a script-writer on EastEnders.
"The writing process is two months per episode. You have to write a first draft, a second, a third and a fourth draft. You keep going back and change things.
"It was a good gig while it was going on. I've turned out so many episodes of different things that it's just like any other job. Writing soaps, there's so little room for your own creative input. It's like pieces of a jigsaw. They tell you what has to happen and you have to arrange it all.
"You're given about 80 percent of what has to happen in your episode, and you can create sort of isolated little things in your episodes, which had to tie into the other episodes. They give you a five-to-10-page document that tells you what has to happen to each and every person. All you can do is say what's going to happen to the person in the morning in the Queen Vic, what's going to happen in the afternoon in the Square. You just have to work out the order and then fill in the words.
"Everybody writing for a soap opera has a different approach, but it becomes quite formulaic. 'When are we going to make him gay?' Or, 'Is she going to sleep with his brother?' I think that is the constant challenge of soaps. [They] introduce new characters and have them play out old storylines. That's my my view.
"While I was doing all of this soap stuff, I was also a radio journalist employed by various radio stations to read or write the news. Soaps were something that I'd get back to every couple of years."
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