Foreword
Bath Spa University’s longstanding MA in Creative Writing has earned a high reputation and produced many published writers. Almost all of them, however, were novelists and poets. So in 2007/8 we started a purposebuilt MA in Scriptwriting. This booklet will give you a taste of what our students did.
We graduated five full-time students the first year. This anthology gives you the first ten pages of a script by four of them, and the storyboard for a documentary by the fi fth.
It’s the first ten pages because, of course, that’s what you need to read to know if a script is any good. Actually, they come to a bit more than ten pages once we fitted them into the book layout. If you want to read the rest, the author’s details are on the script.
Each writer’s work is different. Jamie Whear has written a sitcom with his signature quirky touch. Gemma Middleton provides a pilot script for a TV series about a psychic and a police detective. Rod Stacy-Marks has written an angry and passionate radio play about a disappearing world of work. Natalie Prochaski’s stage play is a psychological drama, full of subtext and nuance, and Shari Bollers’ documentary is about the lives of black gay men.
I hope you enjoy the work that follows. I have enjoyed teaching these people, and I’m proud of them.
Jonathan Neale
Course Leader MA Scriptwriting