UK Scriptwriters - Chris Chibnall (2015) 

A really interesting interview with Chibnall, spanning his whole career up to Broadchurch. 

Points of interest:

• A lot of Chibnall’s TV writing career can be traced back to his stint as a writer-producer for a show called Born and Bred, a small pastoral show, this helped him get a writing job on Life on Mars where he wrote a very much lauded episode.  

Life on Mars was where RTD and Julie Gardner started taking an interest in Chibnall.

(I think it’s this experience as a producer that helped Gardner decide to bring Chibnall in for Torchwood he proved he can produce a show as well as write one.)  

• I was surprised to learn even though Chibnall had the ‘head writer’ title, RTD still had the final say and, in fact, directed quite a lot of Torchwood series 1. Although, thinking on it, Joss Whedon was the same thing with Buffy and Angel before he got distracted with Firefly. 

RTD’s prime directive for Torchwood season 1, was to ‘try everything’. Catherine Treganna’s Out of Time was one of the brilliant things born from the throw everything at the wall and see what stuck approach. 

Season 2 is where Chibnall got a bit more freedom, but the pace and the production schedule was a grind and took a toll. And by season 3 when RTD and Gardner offered him full showrunner status Chibnall decided to accept ITV’s offer to bring Law and Order to the UK. 

• From what I’ve gathered from Chibnall’s interviews Torchwood was fueled by panic, short timelines, hardly any resources, and not really knowing what Torchwood was about. 

• 42 was offered to Chibnall in the hiatus between Torchwood productions, Chibnall went to produce season 2 of Torchwood but when he came back to write 42 learned that the idea had changed and they had no budget for the episode at all. 

The initial idea for the episode he was supposed to write was a follow-up to my favorite Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit two-parter with Zach and Ida with the Ood. The Ood idea was transplanted to series 4. The Planet of the Ood and Chibnall had to write the script that eventually became 42 on the fly.

• Chibnall really, really hated his time writing Camelot with Starz. They had all the budget in the world but the network meddling was constant. Broadchurch was his therapy away from Camelot. 

• Chibnall really loves the collaborative nature of a writer’s room and loves getting notes and editing. This was why I wasn’t surprised when he brought in the writer’s room for series 11, for series 12 I hope he gets to lean on the room more. 

• Chibnall starts from the character when he starts stories: 

“How would this character really, really behave?” and then marry it to a structure or form. This actually makes me go ‘hmmm’ because I feel this is true looking at his other stories, which makes series 11 feel like an outlier in terms of his writing. 

He knows how to juggle a big ensemble, so three characters shouldn’t have been that hard.