{"id":8378,"date":"2017-10-05T18:28:56","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T22:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/"},"modified":"2017-10-24T16:58:43","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T20:58:43","slug":"paul-abbott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Abbott"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2017\/10\/Paul-Abbott.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-8376 \" src=\"http:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2017\/10\/Paul-Abbott.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"222\" \/><\/a>Paul Abbott is not cagey about the fact that he had a difficult childhood. The seventh of eight children growing up in the northern English town of Burnley, he was raised by his eldest sister after they were abandoned first by their mother, then their father. Abbott eventually found solace in writing. He got his start in radio plays before landing a gig on the iconic soap <em>Coronation Street<\/em>. Abbott then set out on his own, creating and writing a wealth of shows, among them the political thriller <em>State of Play<\/em>. With his next project, <em>Shameless<\/em>, Abbott took inspiration from his own life. The Channel 4 series chronicling a dysfunctional Manchester family was both a critical and commercial success, eventually being adapted for Showtime in the U.S. Abbott\u2019s most recent show, <em>No Offence<\/em>, made by his AbbottVision production company, is heading into its third season on Channel 4 and has sold well courtesy of FremantleMedia International. One of the most in-demand and lauded writers working in the U.K. today, Abbott tells <em>TV Drama<\/em> about the inspiration for his comedic crime drama and his approach to writing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Tell us about the idea for <em>No Offence<\/em>. I understand it\u2019s something you came up with a long time ago?<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> It wasn\u2019t ready for about eight years. Like all the best stuff, it incubated for quite a long time. That incubation period was its refinement. My original inspiration was to attract a crime-addicted audience to a comedy. But many comedies have to go so broad to achieve their comedic value. So did <em>No Offence<\/em> when I first came up with it. I put it back in the drawer because it just kind of offended me. When we went too funny it was rude. And when we weren\u2019t funny enough it just looked like a cop show. So we had to find a very specific bandwidth. The funny thing about this is, we did so well on the first series we were cocky, as cocky as you could imagine. We thought it was all available to us. And it wasn\u2019t available to us because we had a brand-new story, and with a brand-new story you have to find that bandwidth again. Writing a series for a crime-addicted audience is one thing. Writing a comedy is another. Technically we have to write two separate shows and then weld them together. Basically, you have to write the procedural as a pure piece of drama and learn how to tilt it. It\u2019s not easy! [<em>Laughs<\/em>] It\u2019s one of the hardest shows I\u2019ve ever written. And dragging new writers into this is not easy. They all think they want to write the comedy. Well, they can, but they have to write the procedural aspect of it so diligently that you\u2019re permitted the privilege of the comedy. It\u2019s a very high call. And we do draft after draft. The grammar for telling the story is hard to find because it can very easily look vulgar, sloppy or lazy. We have to attend to that and tighten the nuts. It has to sound like real life to be funny. If it\u2019s not like real life it\u2019s just comedy, and it can\u2019t just be comedy. It\u2019s a one-hour show. If it were a 26-minute show, the comedy would be far more explicit. Eight years before we clicked on it was when I wrote the first [draft]. It had a big blousy woman with hairs coming through the tights on her legs. But it\u2019s not that now. The people are far more credible. We can get comedy stories from the stories of the week, we can get comedy stories from the serial story, but they are not to be comedy first. The principal rule is you satisfy the procedural first. We are doing two shows for one payment! [<em>Laughs<\/em>]\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> How much of the overarching serialized story can you unwind in each episode while also telling the story of the week?<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> We haven\u2019t been prescriptive about our formula. Sometimes the serial story demands more attention and then there isn\u2019t space to get a big story of the week in. We\u2019ve done all right so far, finding odd things that you\u2019d just never see on television. Taking the audience to a place they didn\u2019t know they wanted to go is the principal mantra of the series. And probably most of the things I do, to be honest. If all we do is procedural then we\u2019ve failed our mission.<\/p>\n[In each season] we\u2019re building to a big finale, so you get fractions of the serial story being exposed along the way, in unexpected ways, and you have to keep that escalation going. We know what the finale is, but we don\u2019t know how it\u2019s going to be executed. That wasn\u2019t true of series two\u2014we had no clue how we were going to end it! [<em>Laughs<\/em>] When we sat down with it the ending just came out organically from the demands of the questions that were raised in the previous six episodes. More freestyle than I\u2019d like!<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> You have a team of writers on <em>No Offence<\/em>, which is rare for the U.K.<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> I worked on <em>Shameless<\/em> in the U.S., and the writers\u2019 room is very well funded. We don\u2019t get the same budgets [in the U.K.]. We can\u2019t spend \u00a36 million an episode, we spend just over \u00a31 million an episode. So we all stay together, live together, for five days and talk every aspect to death. And then the writers go back to their homes elsewhere and write their shit. You interrogate all aspects of the story. People don\u2019t mind contributing to other people\u2019s stories; they don\u2019t mind refining other people\u2019s stories. Your salary pays for you to belong to the series and the title is the chief imperative, not your name, not your lovely words. Can we make it look like a team effort? It\u2019s not an easy ride. It shouldn\u2019t be. We really are trying to take the audience to a place they didn\u2019t know they wanted to go. Some of the gags are very crude and vulgar, but you have to earn those, you can\u2019t just chuck them in. It\u2019s not <em>Roseanne <\/em>with a gag-a-minute set-up. The gags are three times their value if they sound like they belong to real life.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Doing six or seven episodes per season, is that constricting in terms of having to limit your story, or freeing because you can spend more time on each episode and have the room to work on other things?<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> This year we\u2019re only doing six, and that\u2019s because Channel 4 wants it to go out at a certain time and this series just takes time in the edit. I think we did 12 cuts on one episode just to get it right. Every cut was incrementally better. It\u2019s not apologizing for what you\u2019ve shot; it\u2019s tidying your bandwidth. We need a lot of material to be able to do that because the narrative metabolism of the series is so demanding. You need quite a lot of material to attack to get that intelligent compression.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> I read somewhere that you prefer to write longhand and then use an electric typewriter.<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> To be honest, I bought an electric typewriter recently and I just couldn\u2019t bear to look at it. Longhand is lovely. [A typewriter] gives it away to everybody in the house that you\u2019re typing. And if you\u2019re not typing they don\u2019t think you\u2019re writing. If you\u2019re staring at the wall you don\u2019t sound like you\u2019re typing, you don\u2019t sound like you\u2019re writing. When you\u2019re writing longhand your editorial compression is so much greater. You can\u2019t keep scribbling out [words] because then your page looks ugly! [<em>Laughs<\/em>] So you think twice or three times before you [commit to the page]. But then you get your feet up, you write better and it\u2019s more fluid.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> What were some of the things you learned from writing on <em>Coronation Street<\/em>? You were there for a while, weren\u2019t you?<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> I was there for four and a half years as a story writer. That\u2019s an awfully long time, except I loved it. I couldn\u2019t believe my luck. I was very young when I went there. I was about 23 when I started. I just found a picture of me age 25 on <em>Coronation Street<\/em>. I had grown a beard to look older because all the other writers were quite mature and they treated me like a tea boy. The constitutional reward from working on a soap is that you have to work every single day\u2014it can\u2019t stop. Even if you\u2019re sick, you\u2019re writing an episode. You\u2019ve got to know how to just dissolve your entire structure and say, I\u2019ll start again, with vigor. You get excited about the next try because you\u2019ve just learned something. It\u2019s a big problem with new writers when they\u2019ve written something and they read it a week later and it\u2019s shit, and that puts them off writing. Well, you thought it was glorious when you typed it and if it\u2019s not a week later, that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s shit, it means you\u2019ve grown and you just keep growing and keep moving on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Can you write anywhere?<br \/>\n<strong>ABBOTT:<\/strong> Well, I\u2019m having to! I became a writer because I wanted to be a hermit. And then you realize you\u2019ve got to talk your head off and travel around the world. Talking about it and telling people your master plan is a total constitutional contradiction to the reason you became a writer. I\u2019ve gotten good at remembering that I came from a very big family and to write you have to find a place inside your head, not your office. That internalization of stuff is so rewarding. You have to find your space inside your head because you won\u2019t find it in a fucking house! [<em>Laughs<\/em>]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The television writer\/producer discusses the inspiration for his comedic crime drama No Offence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":8379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Paul Abbott - TVDRAMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Paul Abbott - TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The television writer\/producer discusses the inspiration for his comedic crime drama No Offence.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-10-05T22:28:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-10-24T20:58:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2017\/07\/Paul-Abbott-1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"410\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/\",\"name\":\"Paul Abbott - TVDRAMA\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2017-10-05T22:28:56+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-10-24T20:58:43+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/paul-abbott\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Paul Abbott\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\",\"name\":\"TVDRAMA\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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