Monkey snuck into independent producer Kudos's 20th birthday bash at King's Cross restaurant Caravan on Thursday night to hear co-founder and chairman Stephen Garrett reminisce about the early days of the Spooks and The Hour maker. In particular Kudos's fruitful creative relationship with writer Tony Jordan – and the long gestation period for drama projects. Garrett recalled that Jordan came up with the prescient multi-channel idea for a drama thematically linked to a comedy on a second network ... in 1994, when there wasn't a lot of multi-channel TV. Fast forward more than a decade and Echo Beach and Moving Wallpaper were eventually broadcast on ITV1 and ITV2. Garrett also told of turning up to check on the progress of a Blackpool brain-storming session back in the day involving Jordan, Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah – the creative team that would eventually deliver Life on Mars – to find an empty room with a whiteboard, on which someone had written enigmatically "suck carrot in hell". A drama idea that has still not been commissioned, Garrett joked. More's the pity.
