Who writes the scripts; the actors or the writers?

Amanda Redman, Dennis Waterman and Alun Armstrong.

Stars of New Tricks.

Well it's the writers of course; the writer writes the story, creates the characters and writes their dialogue; end of story.

But it's not so simple as that; most of the things I have been in on television, and when I say most I mean nearly all, have had the dialogue to the scenes I was in drastically changed.

This is because the dialogue just didn't work, it didn't flow and it didn't make sense. Most of the writers were educated and were very clever and the stories they wrote were good, but sometimes what works on paper doesn't sound right.

A lot of good writers organise work shops; this has nothing to do with arriving with your hammer and nails, this is a reading of the play with actors good enough to do it and a lot of the times you do more than read, you improvise: both with dialogue and movement.

Mike Leigh does this when 'devising' his scripts.

On the one thing where we were banned from changing the dialogue, Softly Softly – Task Force, a cop show for the BBC, one of the crooks had to say 'I can't wait to get back to the pub and a pint of apple fritter.' Apple Fritter??

No one had heard beer called that before.

I was in a series once where I played a businessman who was working all the hours under the sun and was suffering from some sort of by product of over work – ulcers or some kind of stomach problems – and I needed to have an operation to save my life. People were stopping me in the street and telling me to take the operation.

In the series I was admitted to hospital and then I went out of the series for two episodes and when I came back I was in a meeting with my doctor. One of his lines was 'You really need to come in to hospital.'

Well I had already been admitted to hospital in my last episode so I pointed this out to the director. He said 'Are you sure?'

I had to swear on my life that this was the case but as it was a Sunday there were no writers in the studios. So the director called the script editor at home, who had written the particular episode. He confirmed 'yes' I had been admitted to hospital but to leave it with him and he'll do a re-write.

I suggested that the doctor say 'you had no business checking yourself out.'

They all thought it a good idea so that's what we used; I don't think I 'wrote' that - it could have been improvised; there's a difference. The thing is it was an ongoing series and short cuts had to be taken both with acting and writing.

One line I did want to change one day was in Dixon of Dock Green when I had to say 'we got the skipper on ship shore sarge!' Yeh!! Try it. I did many many perfect takes and the person following me fluffed a line during the scene each time. The producer approached me afterwards and said 'Thank you; I won't forget you.'

He gave me a job later in an episode he directed.

I bring this subject up because there is a storm in a teacup happening in a highly rated television series called New Tricks.

There are three stars in it played by veteran actors. They play ex-detectives who are recruited by the police to work on cold cases; they are in their own little section supervised by a middle aged female detective who is also one of the stars of the show.

This week in the Radio Times, Britain's best selling magazine (I think) the show is profiled; one of the first things the piece says is 'it's clear that in this show, it's the stars who call the shots.'

Amanda Redman, who plays the female ranked detective, goes on to say in the interview, about the show 'It's bland now. The characters are not as anarchic as they used to be . . '

It also accuses the writers of being lazy and repeating themselves and Alun Armstrong, one of the three main characters, is quoted as saying 'We put a lot into making the scripts work. If we felt that a story didn't work, or that bits of a story could be improved, then – if the writer wasn't around – we would set about re-writing it ourselves.”

We know this is only the Radio Times talking to the fans and they might have misquoted but one of the writers has taken umbrage. Writer Julian Simpson hit back at the claims earlier this week, saying actors had never contributed to the script.

In a rant on twitter, he said: ''I was going to be writing today, instead I'm just going to hand the actors a pad and pen. I wish I'd learned this 15 years ago.
Then he says ''A New Tricks I wrote and directed airs on Monday. I can tell you EXACTLY how much of it the actors wrote: not a f**king comma. (sic)
I wonder what the atmosphere will be like on set next time he has to work with them?
Before the piece went into the Radio Times Amanda Redman had already quit and now we hear that Alun Armstrong is on his way too. He said it's nothing to do with the recent comments but of the four leading stars there is only one left.
This sort of thing never made the press in years gone by; loads of leading actors changed their dialogue in the old Hollywood movies. Robert Shaw wrote the Indianapolis dialogue in Jaws but then he was a great writer; also Richard Widmark would arrive with all his scenes re-written in his films and it is said that Orson Welles wrote the cuckoo clock lines in The Third Man – but he didn't write the film; the writer did; a certain Graham Greene.