An up-and-coming actor and writer who's half-Welsh and half-Israeli will have his comedy drama screened on a major TV channel on Tuesday, August 23 as he aims to break into the industry.
TV channel Dave will air The Other Half by Zak Ghazi-Torbati and Kate Reid as part of Writerslam, which is an initiative that aims to shine a spotlight on diverse and emerging talent. UKTV selected six writers who received a paid development commission to work up their original TV ideas into 30-minute scripts suitable for broadcast and for potential expansion into full length series.
Four of these scripts were then green lit to be produced for Dave. Zak, 26, spoke to WalesOnline about getting the opportunity to turn the film script he wrote with Kate into a 30-minute television episode. The synopsis for the short reads: “The Other Half follows 20-something Navid who is half-Welsh, half-Iranian and 100% that b****, who gets the chance to escape his small Welsh town when he lands an internship in the big city: Bristol.
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“But as he runs headlong into his new life, shacking up with his best friend and her painfully privileged family, he’s also running away from his old life in the closet, living with his overprotective father. And the more he tries to keep the two halves of his life apart, the more they keep crashing into each other.”
Zak describes how, following his graduation from university, he’d planned to take a theatre show called Hot Gay Time Machine to London. With limited funds, he was unable to move to the city straight away and therefore, had to live with his best friend Kate and her family. Little did he realise, this would serve as the inspiration for The Other Half.
Zak, from Barry, said: “[The Other Half is about] the kind of culture clash between two people. Sort of a fish out of water kind of vibe,” citing his own first experience of living with Kate and her family.
He also described how he was keen to showcase Iranian culture and the narrative mainly revolves around main character Navid and his father. “It’s sort of a homage to Gavin & Stacey, which was my favourite programme growing up as a Barry boy,” Zak added.
As to how he got involved with the WriterSlam competition, Zak said: “My friend Kate is far more organised than me so she submitted the script to lots of competitions. It had got us into the room with lots of places but it’d never really taken bite because it’s not exactly the most high concept hook of a drama.
"She submitted it to this competition and then we got a call out of nowhere saying that we’d been shortlisted to the final six and of those six, four would be filmed. It was this insane opportunity. I’d never heard of any other competition that offered that kind of thing.”
He then described how the process of filming was “incredible”. “It was such a learning curve,” he said, “We’d written a lot of sketches and done stuff for TV but we’d never had a full-scale pilot or script produced and you suddenly had to take into consideration all the budgetary requirements and how many characters you could get.”
Following the completion of the pilot episode, Zak has said that he would love for a full series to be commissioned but has been careful not to “get [his] hopes up”. He said: “The way we set up the pilot is there are definitely places for it to go and we have a whole series outline in our minds. I really hope that it will go somewhere.”
The 30-minute short has been executive produced by comedian, actor and presenter Romesh Ranganathan, whom Zak has praised for his help of young and diverse writers. "He basically provided this platform for us to work,” he said, “The whole company was so protective of us as writers. They made sure that we could learn at every stage.” For more showbiz and television stories, get our newsletter here.
The Other Half will air on Dave at 10pm on Tuesday, August 23
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