Skins writer Georgia Lester - small diary

Georgia Lester – Writer - Skins Series 4, Episode 4.

Life as a writer doesn’t get much more exciting than sitting in front of your computer (in my case, usually in my pyjamas) and writing (or, again in my case, just staring at the screen, waiting for inspiration to hit). So I thought I’d write about how we came up with the series in our writers' meetings and the first time anyone read the scripts for series 4 out loud...

Every Wednesday all the writers, script editors, contributors and John (our producer) would get together to chat about what we wanted to happen this time round: basically, we needed to decide what we wanted to Skins series 4 to be about.

And this is what we came up with: we wanted to write a series which would make our audience, laugh, cry, scream at the TV and be completely involved in each character’s story. Moreover, we wanted to show the positive side to teenagers in Britain today. There has been a binge drinking, ASBO reputation associated with British youth and we wanted to show that actually, in a world where we are economically and culturally unsure, it is the youth that stand up and fight for what they believe in.

So that was what we wanted, but we then had the slightly harder task of working out how our character's related to these themes, who wanted to write each character's story and how this fitted into the series as a whole. Just as an example (no story spoilers here – sorry!) we needed to make sure that things like Emily and Katie’s sisterly relationship was apparent across the series, not just in a few individual episodes. So, with the use of millions of post it notes, we storylined character journeys both in individual episodes and throughout the whole series.

To make sure we were on the right track, we visited and spoke to college students in London and Bristol and also had teenagers join us in our Wednesday writers meetings to tell us what they thought of our ideas and what they had enjoyed and disliked in previous Skins series. We also met up with the cast to talk about what each actor thought of their character, which was a really interesting way of getting another perspective.

But we couldn't just spend the whole time talking - as well as being in all these meetings, we were all writing our episodes at the same time and the first big deadline we hit for the first 4 episodes was the Read Through...

A Read Through is basically a massively terrifying day where EVERYBODY (actors, executive producers, set and costume designers and important people from channel 4) come and listen to the scripts being read aloud by the cast for the first time.

Our first read through was on a Thursday a couple of weeks before we started shooting. At this point I only had a few days to write my third draft (which would be my read through draft). It was decided that I would work in the office instead of at home and that way Neil and Becky, our wonderful and often life saving script editors, would be on hand across the hallway to help.

The first few days started well but when I arrived on Wednesday morning, with 24 hours to go, I was told that the script was nowhere near ready, and so began the most stressful and exhilarating day of writing my episode for Series 4.

I found the hardest part of the script was the structure. As I approached part 3, I began to panic. Within moments, Neil came to the rescue and we sat for a couple of hours writing together; trying to construct a fun event with a shocking revelation whilst maintaining comedy throughout – it wasn’t an easy task!

Finally at about 10 pm, I knew the direction my script was heading in and was ready to go home and finish it off. As I left the office, with a bunch of other writers and our producer, we found Merv, Lisa and Ollie (Thomas, Pandora and JJ) loitering outside. They’d arrived in London and were desperate to have a look at the scripts. They thought we were joking when we said the scripts weren’t quite finished!

So after a natter, I slid off home for a take-away curry, a Relentless energy drink and four hours of writing / proof reading. At about half three I sent my script off to Neil, who was then in the office with Becky and some other very helpful members of the Skins team at 7am, printing off about 50 copies.

At 9.30 everyone involved in Skins gathered for the read through and although most of us writers had had a severe lack of sleep, the room was buzzing and we were so excited to hear the scripts. The cast did a great job of reading them and everyone left at the end of the day really excited at the prospects the next series holds, which is sort of what we're hoping you feel right about now...