Moran and Gallagher
Posted 20 March 09 by Scott AndrewsTelevision’s James Moran has penned a great big FAQ of writing. It’s full of wit and wisdom and True Things that any aspiring writer should read and pay heed to.
None more so than his passionate defence of Road House. Damn, I love that film. Top trivia fact: it was the favourite film of Dawson Leery.
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Doctor Who’s Stephen Gallagher, a fabulous novelist and a fine telly writer, can’t get himself arrested in the UK. His Doomwatch riff for ITV, Eleventh Hour, which starred Patrick Stewart, didn’t get picked up for a second season and he decided to try his hand in America.
Now, they know a good writer when they see one. The US version of Eleventh Hour, starring brilliant Brit thesp Rufus Sewell, has been a massive hit stateside. And, since they’re not thickies, they recruited Gallagher to write some all new episodes for the show, including the season finale.
So now a US remake of ‘failed’ Brit show, starring a Brit actor playing a Yank version of an originally Brit character, has been brought for UK broadcast by a Brit network, Living.
And I bet ITV and the BBC still won’t take Gallagher’s calls, the morons.
Gallagher was also the driving force behind a 13 part Robinson Crusoe mini-series that’s just finished in the US, for which the aforementioned Mr Moran did some writing. Can’t wait to see that. But why oh why does a successful and self-evidently brilliant British writer have to go to the US to get Robinson bloody Crusoe, a quintessentially British text, turned into telly? I mean, surely that should have been a BBC1 project through and through?
In the end, the Yanks agreed, sort of, and hired a British company to make Crusoe for them, which I think is the first time a british independent has been hired to make telly directly by a US network.
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