Film & Television

Programme Outline

• Television: Lucy Gough discusses writing the soap Hollyoaks as part of a team, and the writer’s responsibility to the teenage audience.
• Film: Ed Thomas discusses his film House of America, and Welsh identity.

Lucy Gough talks about how her own experiences as a teenager influenced her writing: in particular, leaving school at the age of 15 and having a baby at 18. We see her in a script meeting, discussing the development of a plot, with the team of eleven writers who work on Hollyoaks. Gough discusses the importance of dealing responsibly with issues like drugs, pregnancy and relationships for a teenage audience. Four extracts from Hollyoaks illustrate the relationships of Sue and Kurt, and Cindy and Stan. Gough discusses the importance of the ‘hook’ (to keep the audience watching) at the end of every episode.

Ed Thomas talks of how his characters Sid and Gwenny, living in a decaying industrial community, dream of escaping to America, to a better place, a place of adventure and opportunity and space. To them, everything Welsh is second-rate. There are no heroes in Wales. Sid’s heroes are Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation. He invents a story about his absent father living the life of an American cowboy. The four extracts from House of America suggest something destructive about living your life through fictions taken from somewhere else. The people of Wales need their own heroes and stories to live by. ‘Things are starting to change’, says Thomas. ‘Exciting pop music and films are being produced in Wales. And there’s not one Welsh identity now, but a variety of forms and styles. Wales is starting to produce its own heroes and stories.’ Thomas visits his family’s butcher shop in Banwen. His father tells the story of the boy who accidentally killed his mother. We learn something of Thomas’s background, of the images of blood and death influencing his imagination, and of the roots of his story-telling.