We’ve seen Z Cars, Morse, Casualty and Holby City but I’ve often heard social workers wonder why there was no TV series about them, and in particular about child protection. So after retirement I took scriptwriting courses. I felt optimistic; technical or legal aspects of my scripts would be accurate, reflecting my experience of more than 40 years as a social worker in child protection, Guardian Ad Litem, chair of child protection conferences and an adoption/fostering manager. I knew about attachments, Section 8 orders and fostering disruptions and now I understand about subtexts, five-point structure and voiceovers. I hoped that I had a distinctive, authentic voice.
I aim to present the public with a series of complex dilemmas about children needing protection and, by implication, ask what should be done. I create a picture of the fury and confusion provoked by state interventions into family life and demonstrate that once a family fails a child there is no simple reach-me-down remedy. I challenge the narrative that children die at the hands of their parents because social workers don’t care or don’t work hard enough and I show that decisions, fraught with unknowns and risks of future harm, are never simple.
I include some of the common traps for social workers, such as over-identification with the parent or child, the loss of professional distance, being sucked in, or losing the bigger picture. I also show the pressures of the role: the bewilderment and anger of parents and child; the difficulty of getting the full picture of the family situation; the endless joyless bureaucracy; the overwork; the lack of time and funding and the relentless political and press hostility. Occasionally, I throw in the odd social work triumph to cheer the viewers on.
A script tutor once commented that there needed to be more dynamism between the social worker and the child/family. Should the social worker step out of role, have an affair with a parent, torture someone or kidnap a child? I decided this would conflict with my aims and anyway, emotional conflict is inherent to child protection; artificial hyperbole could only cheapen.There were a number of technical aspects I needed to learn, like “show, don’t tell, (avoid unnecessary static exposition by characters) and the importance of subtext (demonstrate the meaning underlying the dialogue). My dramas are of course packed with strong feelings and I found myself wondering why no one had mined child protection for TV drama before. Is it because TV commissioners are unwilling to tackle such a politically controversial topic? But the need to translate this into palatable TV drove me to have a social worker and her manager shouting at each other, arguing angrily in a street in the middle of York, with the rain pouring down and tourists pushing past. They’re discussing whether a child should be removed from his family. Sorry, all you purists.
The children and parents (and much of the dialogue) walked straight from my head and on to the page and I had to be careful not to use exactly the same scenarios. I wanted the children to drive forward the action and be changed by the process. So one writes to her teacher about her abusive father, another refuses to open the door to the social worker, and another makes a life-changing decision to trust adults. My child protagonists are young enough to need protection and to lack understanding of the world, but old enough to have clear views. So the question arises: how much does anyone listen to them? One of my social workers is almost crippled by her own puritanism, another seems to be afraid of sex, another would probably rather be a rock star, and another is an uptight, depressed, abandoned wife. But they all work hard and try to act in the child’s interests.
Structure proved problematic. There are a number of templates for dramas but I wondered whether they were primarily for thrillers rather than social dramas. In the end I decided I didn’t want to shoehorn my characters into an artificial structure so I ditched it. Instead, I reimagined some of the emotional scenes I had witnessed and wove round them a plot that would connect them. I ended up simply telling a story.
I didn’t realise how hard it would be to market my precious oeuvres. The competition is ferocious and the advice given by scriptwriting courses is that networking is essential and we should scan TV and films, identify a director or company that could be interested, and make contact by letter or phone, or even blag our way into festival drinks parties. This takes a bit of nerve and I think selling double glazing will be my next career move. I meet with outright hostility – “who gave you my phone number?” and sometimes unimaginable kindness. I’ve had some success but so far no one has taken me on. “Huge potential” and “compelling drama, deeply convincing and poignant portrayal” are some of the comments from professionals and one drama was shortlisted in a national competition. So, wish me luck. I’ll keep trying.
