Words: Simon Harper
Photography: Sanna Charles

Perhaps best known as the eponymous tank commander in More4 satire Gary’s War, this Edinburgh-born, 28-year-old actor has a true gift for character comedy.

“It’s interesting what tiny things in life you just pick up on that can work,” begins Greg McHugh, on the issue of writing material: “I try not to sit down and go, ‘Right, I want to write about the credit crunch.’”

Topical gags about financial hardship and global economic meltdown might be near the top of the to-do list for several comedians, but Greg draws from a much more personal well of inspiration. “I’ll just sit down and think about small things that have happened, or people that I’ve met. I must admit, I think of people more than situations; I’m character-driven in that way.”

Greg studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama before appearing on the stand-up circuit. He’s already garnered widespread acclaim for his army officer character, Gary: Tank Commander, with More4 commission Gary’s War picking up a Scottish Bafta.

His earliest forays into comedy were behind a microphone stand, but Greg considers himself primarily an actor, not a stand-up. “I think you’re a good actor if you can do comedy,” he explains. “A lot of actors say, ‘Oh, I do straight stuff,’ and I’ve worked with a few that are good straight actors, but they can’t really get a grasp of comedic roles that well.”

“I see myself as an actor who’s done stand-up, but then even in stand-up you’re acting,” he points out. “If you have to do the same material each night, but still make people laugh, you have to act your way through that.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Greg has since found a fruitful outlet in sketch comedy – particularly with regular collaborator Will Andrews in The Incredible Will and Greg, and the award-winning Blowout – as well as a well-received run of short, sharp and delightfully silly sketches at the Edinburgh Festival.

Citing Coogan, Connolly and Whitehouse as inspirations, Greg has been commissioned by The Comedy Unit to write Gary: The Sitcom and increasingly finds himself being sent scripts to peruse as well as writing his own material.

“It’s worth trying new jokes even if they don’t work, because it’s the only way you get better,” is his advice. “Often it’s useful to think, ‘What is it that makes me laugh?’ Doing pilots is an essential way of getting people to see you, to meet commissioners and to understand the process of how things are made.”

Greg’s quick to point out that the daytime isolation of being a writer-performer can sometimes get too much, but there’s always room for distractions. “I’ve got one of these cinema cards where you pay a monthly amount,” he confides. “If I can’t concentrate, I go and watch three films in an afternoon with the other lonely, unemployed men that tend to do that. That’s my hangout.”

Words: Simon Jablonski
Brooker portraits: John Stewardson
Buy Issue 10 here

Charlie Brooker – celebrated Guardian columnist, creator of E4’s Dead Set and all-round misanthropic griper – chats about zombies, twats and sliding moral standards.

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After reading or watching anything penned by Charlie Brooker, you’d be excused for expecting him in the flesh to be an overbearing figure with a machinegun wit, mercilessly shooting down all around him who dare to exhibit a mere suggestion of stupidity or imperfection.

So it’s hard to know whether to react with relief or disappointment when confronted with a polite bundle of buoyant charm who carries himself with the kind of humility that would make Gandhi gaze at his sandals in shame. This contrast in personality between the scathing critic and the chatty fellow sat next to me is not just puzzling for those that encounter him, but also, it appears, for Charlie himself.

“I’ve never thought of myself as a TV critic: I was working in TV along time before I started doing stuff for The Guardian,” he begins. “I wanted to be a comedy writer, and when The Guardian gave me the Screen Burn column I thought, ‘Oh good: I get to be funny each week; my subject matter is TV; off you go.’ As a person I’m quite wishy-washy and say things like, ‘Oh, I suppose you could see it like that.’ I never set out to write a treatise on what’s right and wrong as I think that would be extremely dull. It turned out that I’m quite opinionated though, and I didn’t really realise it. But put me in front of a television and give me a deadline and I get really angry about anything.”

As he reminds us, Screen Burn was by no means the beginning of his foray into TV wonderland. Even before the ‘well Jackson’ Nathan Barley was conceived, or its precursor, the TV Go Home website uploaded, Charlie Brooker was busying himself with a variety of on-screen and behind-the-scenes roles.

“It’s weird because I’ve been working in TV for longer than I’ve been writing about it, and I think that gets lost sometimes,” he reflects. “I was working as a computer games reviewer, and then I got a job presenting a radio show, and then started presenting a technology show in about 1998. Then I started doing the TV Go Home website, which led to a job on The 11 O’Clock Show. I was working on that when The Guardian approached me.”

So, was this television writing stuff always the ultimate ambition? Were these other projects merely craftily trod stepping stones that would always lead to the happy shores of script writing?
“I always wanted to write things, but originally I wanted to be a cartoonist,” he says with a shimmer of nostalgia. “From the age of about eight, I used to do comics to amuse myself. I started out by sending some comic strips to the letters page of a kids’ magazine called Oink. It was kind of like a kids’ version of Viz, and had some of the Viz artists working on it.”

Understandably, he was a bit taken aback when they asked him to bypass the letters page and do some proper comics. “It was my first proper job, which is great when you’re 15: it meant I suddenly had an income. So at the time I thought I’d become a cartoonist.”

Even from this early age there’s evidence of a slightly twisted sense of humour, as well as a penchant for darker subject matter. Two characters he particularly beams over whilst reminiscing are Freddy Flop, a kid with some form of leprosy causing various parts of him to fall off, and the Adventures Of Death, a cartoon whose punch-line would always be that someone gets decapitated with a scythe.

It’s not surprising that a kid sketching about flaking skin and gory beheadings would go on to spawn a show like Dead Set, which had its first airing on E4 in October. The basic premise is simple and well-trodden: an outbreak causes people to die and return as zombies, in order to eat other people. But the twist is that it’s set against the backdrop of modern cultural landmark the Big Brother house, which sits well with the writer’s anti-fame-seeking sensibility when besieged and spattered with guts and gore.

When speaking about the inspiration behind the show, in place of lightning bolts and profound visions there’s the image of a somewhat apathetic god nonchalantly slapping the sleeping writer round the face.

“I’ve always loved the Romero zombie films,” he admits. “I wanted to see zombies on TV, and was surprised that it had never been done. In terms of monsters, they’re quite cheap really. A vampire’s got prosthetic teeth, and has to turn into a bat. Werewolves are expensive: you’ve got to get a full body suit for everybody. But a zombie is basically like a pissed person, so they’re relatively cheap; certainly cheaper than Daleks must be.”

“I was convinced that the Americans were about to unveil a series like 24 but with the living dead in it,” Charlie goes on. “I kept waiting for that to happen, and it didn’t, so I sort of felt compelled. I thought, ‘Now I have to do it.’ It was a bit like being commanded to do a chore.”

When talking about writing he speaks with an endearing modesty that’s completely unexpected from someone with such a self-assured writing style. “The thing that gets me going is a deadline,” he declares. “I’m an absolute Olympian procrastinator. I’m incapable of doing anything until right at the last minute when the voice in my head that’s screaming, ‘You’re rubbish, stop writing, this is shit…’ is drowned out by another voice that just says, ‘Write it, you’ve got to fucking do it, you’ve got to get it done.’”

“I approached Dead Set like an exercise. Can I write a zombie 24? Can I do it? And in a way that I’d want to watch it, with enough unexpected things, florid dialogue, and things that make you go, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t believe that happened’? Hopefully we’ve pulled that off.”

Even when having his photo taken for these pages he doesn’t pose like a man brimming with confidence or smug self-satisfaction. His awkward posturing and puzzled expression are more like that of a tribesman untouched by the modern world who at any moment expects a fanged demon to fly out of the camera.

“Most of the viewers who watch it won’t know or care who I am,” he shrugs when asked about the public anticipation of Dead Set. But given the tone of Screen Burn and his other work, he admits that people were always going to expect something particular from a Brooker-penned zom-com-drama based around the daddy of all fame-hunting reality shows.

“They expected half-an-hour of ‘I hate Big Brother.’ I also think people expected me to write something where they’re all total shit-bags and fuckers,” he says, aureately articulating the general consensus.

“If people expect to hear my voice in it, they’ll hear it coming out of Patrick’s mouth,” he reveals. “As the series goes on, he gets more florid speeches.” Patrick is the callous producer of Big Brother on Dead Set, played by Andy Nyman. “There’s bits when you’ll be thinking he’s just read a Screen Burn column aloud. He’s a panto villain in a lot of ways. It’s not a nuanced portrayal of a modern TV producer: he’s a fucker, and all the better for that I think.”

Of course, it’s somewhat simple-minded to expect that on the grounds of his involvement with Nathan Barley and the mordacious tone that characterises his Screen Burn column, that Dead Set would serve only as a scathing analytic on social licentiousness and obsession with celebrity culture.

“Primarily we wanted this to be nasty; a horror thriller. It’s a populist show, in no way was I thinking that I’d tell it how it is. It’s straightforward enough, it’s obviously comic, but we were always going for something like the original Dawn Of The Dead. Everyone bangs on now about that film being a great satire about consumerism, but ultimately it’s a romp. You don’t have to be sitting there thinking, ‘I know what he’s saying about capitalist society.’ You can just go, ‘Oh, here come the zombies. Brilliant!’”

This obvious enthusiasm for guts and gore was another motivation to write the show in the first place: “It was an opportunity to do a series that has popular appeal, and also is unpleasant,” as Charlie puts it. “It’s fantastical and I like the idea of doing something populist and stupid. One thing I liked about shows like The Twilight Zone is that they’re unbearably cruel.”

If nothing else this talk of cruelty fills me with the warming glow of familiarity as the Charlie Brooker next to me, at least for a minute or two, flickers with a resemblance to the caricature Charlie Brooker that’s grown out of Screen Burn, and currently resides in my head.

I push him on why anyone would intentionally create cruel television. “Most programmes are inherently reassuring,” he reasons. “24 is a really hardnosed show in that they sometimes kill off a well-loved character in a gruesome and unpleasant way. But they have to throw in all the scenes where people say, ‘I love you Dad.’ I wanted all those bits jettisoned, leaving just the hardnosed nasty bits and people running around frightened.”

Does this emphasis on gut-wrenching, spleen-chewing savagery mean there’s no moral to Dead Set? “Well, primarily it’s a romp, but there were things in my head that I was thinking about. We live in times where we’re constantly aware of some sort of looming threat – terrorism, bird flu, global warming, the economy – but at the same time we’re completely obsessed with trivia and celebrity. I get sucked into I’m A Celebrity more than what’s going on in my street. I thought it’d be great to clash the two: invent some terror, and have it colliding headlong with TV fluff.”

Even when speaking about reality TV ‘stars’, there’s a subtle whiff of compassion masked under the sharp tone. “There’s a lot of hatred that gets thrown at Big Brother contestants, deservingly if they’re nasty people, but they often seem to be nasty people because it’s a giant twat amplifier. It makes someone who’s a bit of a wanker seem like the biggest wanker you’ve ever seen.”

“There’s also a lot of hatred thrown at them for seeking fame, but I think why not? If you’re 22 and working at McDonalds, and the Big Brother or X-Factor auditions come along, who’s to say you shouldn’t try out? I’d say do it. It’s a catch-22: you’re a twat if you do, and a twat if you don’t.”

Though there are smatterings of humour throughout Dead Set, it obviously signals a broadening of his writing repertoire. “The original scripts were very straight, there were no jokes in them at all. And we wanted to differentiate it from things like Shaun Of The Dead. I thought that was fantastic, but it’s a different type of humour in that they’re aware they’re in a fiction. There’s that very funny scene where the zombies are coming and they’re throwing their record collection; our characters would never do that, because they’re too scared.”

However, whereas films like Shaun Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead can draw audiences into a bubble and build tension over an hour-and-a-half, were considerations given as to how to maintain that same tension over five episodes? “Yes, and hopefully we’ve pulled it off. Because of the nature of it, it’s fast-paced and there are a lot of characters. 24 was the model in my head. It’s a plate-spinning exercise; it’s constant egg timers. It was like solving a puzzle all the time, working out what could go wrong next.”

“It’s also been ruthlessly structured around commercial breaks. 24 is laid out like a series of pistachio nuts: you’ve got to have one, then you see another one. The idea was to make it like that. Hopefully the first episode builds to a climax every eleven minutes or so: the other episodes were 22 minutes, which is really quite short, but hopefully there’s enough variety to keep you going.”

Having applied his pen to various forms of writing, including a recent dabble in travel journalism for The Guardian, what unique challenge does screenwriting present? “The trickiest thing was working out what the next bit of peril is,” he reveals. “It’s like solving a Sudoku, and it really is that dry in a lot of ways. But Dead Set was easier in that, unlike something like The Wire, everyone’s motivations are pretty basic: ‘Help, we’ve got to survive!’”

Charlie’s first major screenwriting project was cult classic Nathan Barley, which follows the antics of an affluent media type living off his parents’ wealth, whose cringing naivety and absolute commitment to all things ‘street’ managed to create both a monster and a legend out of the same character.

The series originally spawned from his TV Go Home website, which displayed spoof listings for fictional programmes. “When we came to do the series we looked at the listings and realised that Nathan Barley himself wasn’t a character, but an object of scorn. We had no real description of what he thought, so that was our first problem. I think people who read TV Go Home were used to seeing him as a Patrick Bateman American Psycho character who was very cold and aloof, which we actually thought about. We used to say that in the listings he was a cunt, whereas in the series he was a cock.”

Though going from TV Go Home to Nathan Barley may not always have been quite as simple as switching the genitalial form of the main character, were there any lessons to be learnt that made penning Dead Set a little easier?

“Well the process of working out a plot is very similar, in that it’s a nightmare,” says Charlie. “The hardest bit was working out things like why does Dan get a haircut? Why is Nathan rapping when he’s going down on Claire? One of the lessons I learnt from Nathan Barley is that you don’t have to explain. If you watch Friends, it’ll open with Joey or someone walking in and announcing, ‘I’ve just been giving a part in a Polish soap opera, so I’ve got 24 hours to learn Polish.’ That sets up the story for the rest of the show. You don’t ask, ‘But why is it Polish?’ You just think, ‘Oh, this’ll be fun,’ and go with it.”

When it was first aired neither critics nor viewers seemed to know what to make of it, but the gradual rise in popularity of Nathan Barley since its release on DVD surely justifies calls for a second series. “We were planning one in quite some detail about two years ago, but then Dead Set got started.”

The planning process was in quite an advanced stage, with workshops being held in 2007 with various cast members including Julian Barratt (of Mighty Boosh fame) and Nicholas Burns (who played Nathan in the first series). Episode structures had been worked out, and even bits of scripts written.

Whereas most of us might be happy with more of the same hedonistic japes and floral swearing that coloured the original series, Shoreditch is a very different world from the one of 2005 – the sacking of Spitalfields for one will not be forgotten. So what are we to expect from a future series?

“The second series would be slightly different in that everything would have moved on a few years. Nathan’s approaching 30, he’s put on a bit of weight, his hair’s thinning a bit, and his parents have cut off his limitless supply of cash. He’s facing the fact that he’s basically never achieved anything. He has to move out of his flat and in with his brother, who’s currently going through a bitter breakup. His brother’s comparatively square – a GP who before his bitter breakup was painfully ‘Observer Lifestyle magazine’. He’s very conventional, tucks his shirt in every morning and has nice things in his kitchen. Nathan finds himself in an un-cool part of town and doesn’t know what’s going on.”

The fish-out-of-water shtick is always a safe comedy bed, although for many part of the satisfaction of chuckling at Nathan Barley derived from sneering despisingly at that whole Shoreditch ‘new meeja’ element. So why take it out? “We haven’t entirely taken it out, but we wanted to flip everything around so that Nathan was not master of his little kingdom,” Charlie explains.

“We always thought that cocks like Nathan Barley have existed from the dawn of time. If you work in a lighthouse, chances are there are Nathans in the lighthouse community. We never thought of this as a satire on Shoreditch, but as a comedy about a dickhead, a complete cock. Shoreditch was just the backdrop; it could ostensibly have been set in 1925 with different costumes. It’s about a successful twat and a bitter onlooker. In his new setting he’s completely awash in what he perceives as Squaresville, where he thinks everyone is a fucking granddad conformist idiot. So he becomes a bit more Dan Ashcrofty in that respect, whereas actually he’s acting like a fucking child.”

Is there room in this new setting for any of the other original characters? “Dan is working as a minicab driver because he’s quit his freelance job and has decided to write a novel, but actually he’s just driving a minicab and not really writing anything. Also, Nathan’s ex-lackey, Pingu, has become massively successful in some other field. That was basically the setup.”

Charlie talks excitedly about script ideas that are in various stages of plotting. “There was this whole episode that revolved around an incident in which Dan walks across the road and somebody calls him fat, so he decides to go and join a gym. But I was particularly pleased with one in which Nathan finds a gun and he ends up accidentally firing it out of the window.”

“All that happens is that it goes across the road, straight through the window of a house that Nathan’s brother promised a painfully middle-class couple that he’d look after. It’s gone slap-bang in the middle of a giant plasma screen TV. The rest of the episode revolves around their attempts to rectify the problem. They can’t work out whether to replace the TV or smash the place up and make it look like it was a burglary.”

And his writing partnership with Chris Morris appears to have a future, even if Nathan Barley doesn’t. “We’ve actually been discussing something else – not the Jihad comedy that he’s going ahead with,” he clarifies, referring to the fabled suicide-bomb-com that his controversy-courting colleague is working on. “We’ve been discussing something so amorphous that I don’t know how to describe it. It’s about television, basically.”

Theirs is surely an ideal, albeit slightly concerning, pairing. Some of the concepts he reels off for future shows could sit comfortably within an episode of Brass Eye. “I wanted to do a game show in which contestants are shown the faces of young children, and have to guess whether they are being shown hardcore pornography or uncensored war footage,” he chuckles.

British television might not be quite ready for that, but as the media ceaselessly contort our notions of acceptability, this is certainly one man who’ll be catching a ride on the back of sliding moral standards. And all the better our televisions will be for it.

Following on from our finalist announcement for Radio HaHa, here are some short biogs of the chosen 9. Many thanks to all those who took the time to submit their moments of comic genius.

Daniel Jamieson
Daniel is a 17-year-old film student from Edinburgh. His submission, AJ and Finnegan, is a spoof American cop show following partners AJ, a young hot-shot rookie, and Finnegan, a gritty old-hand maverick as they fight back threats to national security while constantly arguing about it. It was created in his college’s recording studio, and Daniel directs, storylines, edits and adds sounds to each episode, while allowing actors to improvise some real comedy gold.

Jenni Armstrong
Jenni is a stand-up comedian who writes sitcoms for radio and television, and makes comedy shorts. She uses a DIY aesthetic to enhance the surreal comedy of her work, and has filmed a mini-series called Jenni Shows and Tells which can be viewed on YouTube. In May, Jenni did a comedy review in the style of this show for 4Laughs. Jenni’s submissions for Radio HaHa include Lebacuppacoffee, a mock promo for a Lebanese coffee shop, and the surreal skit The Adventures of Gok Wan.

Lauren O’Reilly
Lauren is a 22-year-old postgraduate student in scriptwriting and drama school graduate who aims to write scripts for radio. Her idea for Radio HaHa, The Race, is an inner space-style comedy skit following sperm as they compete to fertilise an egg following a drunken encounter. Lauren’s inspiration for the piece struck following a night out where Lauren found herself watching a group of drunken men dance terribly and asked herself, “You were the one that reached the egg first?”

Madeleine Brettingham
Madeleine is a radio and television comedy writer whose work has featured on several Radio 4 programmes, including Recorded for Training Purposes, Fordham and Lipson and The News Quiz. She’s interested in comedy that provides a new take on the world, and her submission, Goth Town, poses questions such as ‘What’s it like having to exude satanic majesty while you’re buying bogroll from CostCutter, or visiting your nan?’ Goth Town follows the story of a misfit brother and sister who live in a grimy townhouse near Morrisons, and their struggle to stand out in a grey world.

Richard Cray
Richard is a former radio commercial producer who, in his words, “Left the industry to get a proper job.” He’s been a regular on the London comedy circuit, produces podcasts for Comedy 365 and is co-producing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Richard’s submission is a compilation of spoof radio ads and promos: The Dogs Must Be Carried, Top 50, and Liar News.

Nicola Depuis
After studying Radio & Theatre Production, Nicola worked as a journalist for seven years, during which time she hosted a weekly radio show. A finalist in the Galway Film Fleadh pitching competition this year, her first screenplay was recently optioned and she’s currently working on a studio assignment. Tubescent is a radio sitcom that gives a comic insight into the lives, worries and conversations of teenage friends aimlessly riding the public transport systems of their city.

Richard Kelly
Richard is a former teacher who is now focusing on a writing career. His sit-com, The Good Defenders, is a comical take on the traditional superhero story following a team of B-list heroes that protect Earth from rogue celebrities, with some hilarious consequences.

Andy Ward
A recent Keele University graduate, Andy Ward presented, produced and wrote several popular university radio shows while studying there and has recently been trying his hand at stand-up comedy. His submission, Spooky Times, is a surreal ghost story that follows a man who encounters particularly bad problems whilst attempting to prepare a barbecue, juxtaposing the presentation style and atmosphere of a serious ghost story with a comic writing style.

Stephen Yorke & Ben Harris
Stephen and Ben are a duo who write TV radio and press ads at separate advertising agencies in London. The pair recently decided to collaborate on their own comedy pieces. and came up with the idea of creating podcasts to bring their comedy to the world. Their programme, Funpot, is recorded at home on their computer and comprises 5-minute slots of the pair ‘trying to make each other laugh’ by creating comic situations and playing off one another.

As you may have noticed, over the last few months we’ve been calling for up-and-coming comics to fling their funny bits in our direction for a unique competition with E4 Radio, called Radio HaHa. The response was incredible: we had literally thousands of audio clips and scripts snippets piling into our inbox.

It took us a little while, but we have our 9 finalists. They’ll be wending their wily ways to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival next week for a day of intensive workshops, followed by a nerve-racking pitch to a panel of E4 Radio commissioners, who have pledged to match at least one of them with an independent production company to take the idea to broadcast.

So here they are:

Daniel Jamieson for his shrewd spoof of US police drama
Jenni Armstrong for her delightfully surreal Gok Wan adventures
Lauren O’Reilly for her sticky sperm sketch The Race
Nicola Depuis for teen-public-transport-com Tubescent
Madeleine Brettingham for Goth Town’s dark humour
Richard Kelly for his off-the-wall take on the superhero genre
Stephen Yorke for some witty on-air banter
Andy Ward for his dryly hilarious Spooky Times
Richard Cray for taking off local radio cliches with tongue firmly in cheek

You can also read more detailed biogs of all of the above.

More to come from the finalists: watch this space. We’ll be following the ideas through the development process in the next issue of 4Talent magazine, and they’ll even be featuring in a special episode of The Fix podcast, which launched with the first episode yesterday.

“We’ve started filming on a new thriller written by Charlie Brooker, which is unlike anything that’s been done before. Can’t say too much, but it’s really original with an amazing cast.

We need a healthy varied mix of ideas all the time, so are open to anything that’s different to what we’ve already got. Besides sitcom, most other ideas are usually quite talent dependent – if someone discovers an amazing new talent we can always work with them on the vehicle.

We take risks and try to find fresh new ways of making shows. Chris Morris embodies the kind of pioneering spirit of doing challenging work that other broadcasters might shy away from. Something like Fonejacker has a dynamic inventiveness that makes it feel perfect for us.

We still run Comedy Lab (6 x 30’) on C4, and now have Funny Cuts (10 x 10’) on E4 as entry-level shows for people to cut their teeth. The more opportunities we have to create stars and production talent of the future, the healthier our TV industry will be. Bring it on.”

Shane Allen: Commissioning Editor, Comedy, Channel 4

“I have a one-off film coming up called Working Britney, where young up-and-coming comedian Buddy Dolphin (I suspect that’s not his real name) will live as a paparazzi photographer, working to get a photo of Britney Spears. As Britney faces custody battles and a drink-driving hearing, Buddy will experience the crazy LA scene that‘s worth millions. Hopefully this film will provide an intelligent and honest account of an infamous subject and her even more infamous press entourage.

I’m most proud of I’m Spasticus. Wittily entitled after an Ian Drury song (he had polio, you know), this was a little half-hour Comedy Lab – a hidden-camera stunts show starring disabled comedy actors, poking fun at the able community. Like an amputee running out of the Brighton seafront screaming ‘Shark!’ or a blind man asking a delivery woman to read out an embarrassingly pornographic letter. It was silly and fun, but more importantly it created a bit of a ripple in the comedy world, and a huge splash in the world of disability.

Non-derivative formats are a must; presenters who have opinion (and the authority to possess valid opinion); a sense of social purpose; and a dash of attitude. It’s hard to find suitable slots, but I’m committed to trying out new people in all areas. I’m always interested in presenters that don’t necessarily come from the perfectly-preened presenter’s mould, or are famous for being famous.”

Ruby Kuraishe: Editor, Factual Entertainment / E4, Channel 4

Words: Miles Johnson
Photography: John Stewardson

In a small central London room a fiery debate has just erupted. “I just think it’s not that simple,” says Lucy Kirkwood, 24. “Female friendships are more complicated than that.” The rest of the group sit up from their coffees, awaiting a reply from the middle-aged man chairing the meeting. “Lucy,” he says with a hint of frustration, “for me, female relationships are about power; are about control. That’s what all the girls we’ve talked with have said.” There’s a pause. Everyone sits back to think again, and takes a swig of coffee.

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On first appearances it could be a particularly engaged university tutorial. Ten or so people are stuffed onto sofas, most of them in their teens and early twenties, and each has been passionately arguing their position for several hours. But there are a couple of mature students sat among the youngsters, one of whom looks suspiciously like the comedian Robin Ince.

There’s also a kid in the corner sipping from a juice carton who, from a different angle, could be the spitting image of Posh Kenneth from Skins. Just as everyone is about to leave a cheery announcement comes from the chair that settles any lingering confusion: “Congratulations on the Bafta nomination, guys!”

If you haven’t seen or let alone heard of Skins yet, you’re presumably a resident of a particularly out-of-touch old peoples’ home, or had your cable connection accidentally switched to North Korean state television. In two seasons, the show’s chronicling of the trials and tribulations of a group of sixth-form students from Bristol has gone from a semi-cult hit adored by its target under-25 audience to one of Channel 4’s triumphs of the last five years.

Whereas most depictions of British teens fall somewhere between gun-toting hoodies and bleach-blonde proto-WAGs, the creators of Skins pride themselves on having crafted a show about young people that doesn’t shirk controversy or paint an overly rosy picture. Indeed with awards, high ratings and a new season in the pipeline it seems things could not be going better.

“It’s not usually that heated,” says 23-year-old Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain an hour after the writers meeting, seemingly more relaxed now away from the creative coalface. “This time round was a little more intense than normal; we’re obviously all excited about making the new series.”

It would be hard not to be excited in his position. Not only does Jamie have to sort his laundry for an award ceremony later that night, but his phone has been ringing constantly with mysterious calls from Japanese numbers. “The explanation for that is a bit strange really. When we were filming one of the online bits I accidentally left my phone number in one of the scenes after the edit. Now I am getting constant calls from Japan from people there who watched it.”

Being ‘big in Japan’ is a measure of success in any field, unless you’re Spinal Tap. But it’s not only the show’s ‘conventional’ success of good ratings and awards that have seen television industry types get their pantaloons in a twist. Targeting a teen audience notoriously difficult to pin down, the show’s arsenal of blogs, social networking profiles and podcasts – a development now referred to a ‘360-degree marketing’ by those in the know – has had executives across the land weeping with envy.

If, for example, you felt the need to get closer to the show’s young Asian character Anwar, you could check up his MySpace page. There you would not only discover his penchant for Lethal Bizzle, but would also have access to a web-exclusive video diary with the character discussing his girl problems. Head to Posh Kenneth’s page and the fan can enjoy a loving Wordsworthian ode to Jal interspersed with his signature brand of street patois.

If even then your appetite for all things Skins was still not sated, you could plug into Bebo video updates, or switch to iTunes and download the podcast presented by Daniel Kaluuya, the actor who plays Posh Kenneth who is also a writer on the show. Including phone-in questions from audience members and interviews with the cast, the Skinscast, as it’s been termed, was at one point the most downloaded podcast on the whole iTunes playlist.

Alongside the overall quality of the programme itself, it seems clear that the multiplatform ingenuity of Skins has enabled it to reach and hold onto a loyal audience in ways previous shows could only dream of. It is, in its own way, the defining televisual project of the British YouTube generation. But at a point in television where television executives and producers are increasingly heralding the possibilities brought by new media platforms, do the writers of the show ever feel their creation is being distorted by the marketing men?

“There is obviously a gulf between what the show says and how Skins is marketed,” says Lucy Kirkwood, one of the writers on the show. “But I think there’s something quite fun about the marketing. I really like this season’s advertising campaign. It captures the spirit of the show and is quite dark.” Ben Schiffer, another writer, agrees. “I think it would be really churlish of us to complain about the marketing – it brought us an audience, and that’s great.”

Shiffer however sees the significant noise made about Skins’ various multiplatform tentacles more as a generational issue than something specific to the show. “Whenever I mention Skins to people, it’s always the people who work in the media who are interested in the multiplatform stuff. They are always the people who are like ‘Skins, oh yes, it’s the big multiplatform thing and you guys have done this, this and this.’ They are the people that seem to find it so new and interesting. But for the audience I think it somehow feels natural to them. They don’t find it particularly remarkable and that’s why I think it’s successful. We’re communicating with them on a really natural level, which isn’t new or strange for them.”

Daniel Kaluuya also sees the success of the podcast he presents and the Skins blogs, Bebo and MySpace presences as being more a natural progression to suit an audience that has grown up with the Internet, rather than a novel marketing ploy. “The important thing to realise is that all the online stuff helps the fans get more into the characters. We just take the characters seriously. On the podcast, it’s not like we just say, ‘Oh, these are make-believe characters, this is a make-believe land and these things aren’t really happening. It’s a TV show that quite a few people really care about and we always take it seriously, whether it’s online or not.”

Ben agrees: “That’s why Skins is perceived to be such a success – we’re the only show to have really captured that audience. Advertisers are desperate to hit the audience that we’ve captured. And we work because we don’t condescend to them.”

In a suitably 21st century take on the creative process, the writers also recognise the possibilities media like blogs allow them for character development. While pre-Internet shows relied on scripts in the traditional manner, creating MySpace pages for the characters placed a new developmental tool into the hands of the writers.

“If you looked at Chris’ MySpace page last year, he actually became much more fleshed out because of it,” says Lucy. “You see that he likes Adam and the Ants and can find out much more about his character than would be normally possible. Skins is about a group of friends, and the whole appeal in the first series was about meeting a group of people you would have wanted to be friends with if you knew them. When you first make friends you sort of do what a MySpace page does by saying, do you like this or that, what are your top five bands? It’s like an electronic friendship. It allows you to show a side of the characters that might seem forced if it was in the show.”

Each of the writers contributes to the online features by writing blogs and video snippets for the characters, a side to the show that allows a young pool of talent to cut their teeth away from the glare of terrestrial television before graduating to penning hour-long scripts. But the writers are also quick to emphasise that they don’t see the online material being in any way less important than the show proper.

“All the online material comes from the same place as the show, so we all try and aspire to the same level,” says Shiffer. “No one ever goes, ‘Oh it’s just for the Internet so we’ll just bang it out. We’re trying to broaden out the universe of the show, rather than just providing lame ancillary storylines because we heard it was a good marketing tool.”

But are they ever worried about the potential for the online content and podcast to become gimmicky and distracting from the more serious side of the show? “The audience doesn’t view it that way,” says Shiffer. “I don’t think our audience makes any qualitative difference between watching something on MySpace and watching something on telly. It’s not worse or immediately lower-status because you watched it on the internet; it’s just the same thing.”

Jamie agrees: “The podcast did very well, so it obviously reached a lot of people who didn’t view it as a gimmick,” he points out. “All the material is well read, well commented on and discussed. It seems to do well in getting people talking about the show and contributing to it through competitions, which can only be a good thing.”

While they are rightly confident that the multi-platform approach has helped rather than hindered Skins’ aim of portraying British teenage life in a realistic but entertaining way, the first series’ pre-air marketing campaign (featuring a bunch of handsome actors looking elegantly wasted) gave some the wrong first impression. The Guardian’s TV critic Charlie Brooker for one said that the first episode had him “harrumphing like a four hundred-year-old man.”

Since, though, Brooker and many others have repented – and now recognise the greater levels of depth the writers have strived to instil into the characterisation of storylines. The series is now well-known for featuring delicate issues in its plotlines, such as anorexia, drug consumption and racial tension.

“The first ever episode did have its faults, but I think we’ve since shown we can deal with complicated issues and entertain young people,” says Jamie. Another writer on the show, Atiha Sen Gupta, agrees. “I think that’s the Skins philosophy really: taking a character that could be a stereotype, but doing it well. In series one, we had an anorexic girl but we subverted it. That gives the show its strength.”

There’s also been the odd critical voice attacking the show for glamorising drug consumption and casual sex, an argument the writers feel is unjustified. “People are going to take drugs and throw big parties whether there was Skins or not,” says Sen Gupta. This is also a point Daniel Kaluuya feels particularly strongly about. “I think it was Eminem who said something about people not being able to handle looking in the mirror and not liking what they see. Skins isn’t trying to glorify drugs; people just take them. People do drugs and have sex, so if we’re trying to write something realistic why can’t we put them in the show?”

Puritans aside, it seems more of the British television-watching public are beginning to awaken to the fact that Skins is not merely a fancy exercise in new media or empty pandering to a ‘youth demographic’, but is actually a show that could stand the test of time. On that matter Jamie, for whom the show’s characters were once merely vague ideas inside his head, is philosophical.

“I think it would be arrogant of us to assume we impact upon peoples lives in any major way, but it’s clear that this show means a lot to the people who watch it. We aren’t sure how long it will go on for, but we are defiantly going to do another series after the next. It means a lot to us, and we just want to keep it running for as long as feels right.” And with a talented and passionate gang of writers, an innovative approach to new media – and of course all those calls from Japan – Skins could probably continue for as long as they wish.