Where do you start when creating a new soap? How do you go about creating a setting, a cast of characters and a set of storylines to launch what you hope will be a long-running serial drama?
There’s a bit of a chicken and egg element to the question; do characters come first or do you start with stories and then find the characters to tell them?
I’ll be honest with you; I’m not claiming to know the answers to those questions! There are no magic formulas, no recipes that if followed guarantee success. For every EastEnders and Coronation Street there is an Albion Market or an Eldorado.
What I do know, is how I approached it on this project and, as with most things connected with Greenborne my instinct has always been to go back to the lessons I learned from the late Tony Holland, the writer/script editor who co-created EastEnders. Tony always started with character. Before any stories or scripts were thought about he wrote short but detailed biographies for each of the characters. These would describe the main biographical information of each character with some life history and hints about their personality such as their likes and dislikes, their hobbies and passions. Tony created a set of these for the original cast of EastEnders and every time a new character was added to the show a similar document was written for them. As a Script Editor on the show, I found myself writing a number of these over the years: sometimes creating characters almost from scratch and sometimes taking ideas pitched by the producers or writers and developing them.
The important thing about these “biogs” is that they are a starting point. They are not written in stone but give both the writers and actors some first ideas about who these characters might be. Over time, events in the soap itself, and extra details and/or revelations from the past will add new details to these documents. Additionally, and crucially, these biogs are also a story resource. Soaps are story eating machines. They get through story material so quickly that there is a constant need for new stories. Soap stories come from a variety or sources; they can be sparked by a story in the news or an anecdote you hear from a friend or family member. Sometimes it can be a partially overheard conversation at a bus stop or a bar. Sometimes they emerge from a desire to explore a particular illness or life change (becoming a father, tackling cancer, getting married). Sometimes it’s just a question of “where next?” for this couple or family…
Again, when I worked on EastEnders, and we were discussing future story material for a character Tony would always tell people to “go back to the biogs.” He believed that the biogs were a resource that you could mine for story. And he was right. The trick, of course, is to put story potential into the biogs that can be exploited and developed into storylines further down the line. This could be a secret or a weakness or a pattern of behaviour that can be brought out of the past and dramatized in the “now” of the series.
So, that’s how we started with Greenborne. Both series director, Andrew (Mark Sewell) and I looked back to Tony’s original set-up in EastEnders. There were two points of focus in early EastEnders: the Fowler/Beale clan headed up by the matriarchal figure of Lou Beale and the electric couple running the local pub: Den and Angie.
Andrew also had a short-list of actors he really wanted a chance to work with on this, and at the top of that list were John Altman, Corrinne Wicks and Louise Jameson. Three fantastically talented actors with great experience of soaps who very quickly fitted the roles of the husband-and-wife team at our local pub and the village matriarch. So, it was the characters of Alan and Bev Godwin and Evie Lejeune, who were the first to be developed. And then the rest of the characters began to form around them. Quickly I added Alan and Bev’s late-teenage kids and Evie’s newly independent daughter. Once I knew Evie would be coming back to Greenborne after a long Covid-exile, I knew Lisa needed to have entered a new relationship in her absence. Which led me to Arjun, recently widowed and just beginning to explore the possibility of loving again. And Arjun then needed family around him – his father Sam, who could be an old friend of Alan’s and son Jeet, who would be a contemporary of Alan and Bev’s kids, Daisy and Lewis…
And we were off and running… Hopefully for a long time to come…
Welcome to Greenborne! I do hope you like it here…
Colin Brake, 19th March 2021.
