Gwawr Martha Lloyd on the new Channel 4 Drama writers scheme

This month Channel 4 announced the TV Drama New Writers Scheme aimed at identifying the best new writing talent in the West and South West. The six-month programme will enable twelve writers to hone their craft through mentoring and networking sessions, finishing with the creation of a spec script for consideration and feedback from TV Drama Commissioning Editor Gwawr Martha Lloyd. We spoke to Gwawr to find out more about the scheme.

We started off by talking about the importance of championing regional voices in television. Over the last few years, Channel 4 has begun to divest its productions from London. Gwawr, who lives in Cardiff and works in Bristol, told me that there is a small team at Channel 4 Drama and they are spread across 4 locations: London, Bristol, Leeds, and Cardiff. Together they are trying hard to “make sure we are representing the nations and the regions [in TV Drama]. As we didn’t feel we knew many writers from the South West and it was full of rich ideas, we needed to find a formal way that will help us get to know and tap into talent from the region”.

Gwawr notes that although they have many productions filming around the United Kingdom, only “a handful of them are set where they are filmed, and this scheme is about finding those authentic voices who are telling stories based in the locations they will be filmed”.

The scheme is for writers who have been writing in other forms but don’t yet have a TV credit. “They may have written a radio play, or made a short film, or written for theatre. The scheme is for those writers who are great but need a leg up to get to know producers, agents, and commissioners in the TV world”. Channel 4 are looking for writers with an original voice that have something to say about the region they’re in, with Gwawr telling me they were deliberately not prescriptive about the type of scriptwriting samples they take as they want to see a distinctive perspective as well a compelling subject.

I asked Gwawr about the types of dramas Channel 4 commissions, and what scale or ambition applicants should be thinking about when they write their pitch. She explains that Channel 4 Drama has several strands: returnable dramas “tend to be set in a precinct or a very specific location but will tell you something new about that location with standout characters”; like the 4 x 90 minute Jack Thorne care-home drama HELP, which are “political and urgent, with a very specific story for the audience to form an opinion on”, and younger skewered drama like THE END OF THE F***ING WORLD written by Charlie Covell which tend to be in the form of 8x30 minute episodes and have “quite traditional stories like a coming of age story, or a love story, but are told in an interesting heightened way”.

I finish by asking whether they would consider receiving applications for scripts containing the Cornish language. Gwawr tells me that Channel 4 is currently making a programme shot in back to back in Welsh and English, and although they probably wouldn’t do a series completely in a language other than English, they would be interested in a Cornish writer using a bilingual approach as “people are always interested in the minority languages of the UK [and showing them on screen] can be a really important part of making people feel the language is accessible”.

Gwawr ends by telling me ‘Channel 4 are really excited about this scheme where it hopes that it will help us to get to know some brilliant writers and also create a community of writers, producers and talent in Cornwall’.

The deadline for the Channel4 New Writers Scheme is midnight on Sunday 12th June.
Full guidelines and application form are at https://careers.channel4.com/4Skills/TVDramaNewWritersScheme