Tuesday 18 May 2021

The Writers' Guild... and the BBC...

I have distributed this note, below, to the BBC History group...

Wed 12/05/2021 


I have, at last, got hold of and I have read...

Yapp, Nick. 2009. The Write Stuff: A History of the Writers' Guild of Great

Britain 1959-2009. [London]: The Writers' Guild of Great Britain.

 

I have the pdf in front of me now.  Nick Yapp's history was published by the

Writers' Guild in 2009.  In a pattern that is familiar to us from our other

lives, when small organisations publish a book, in 2009 the book rapidly

disappeared from sight, and has not had the attention, and the use, it

deserves.  You will see variant bibliographic entries for the book - I have

followed what the text says.  I think that I give the correct bibliographic

information.


The book is of special interest to the historians of the BBC - the book has

199 references to the BBC in its 239 pages.  From its origins in the 1950s,

as the British Screen and Television Writers' Association (BSTWA), the

Writers' Guild has constantly been in negotiation with the BBC, sometimes

friendly negotiation.  The BBC was initially a monopoly supplier of radio

and television, and is always a major employer of writers and publisher of

their works.  There was also, and is still - as my readers here will be

aware - a constant churn of well-known names, from management within the BBC

and round the culture industries.  This needs constant name-checking by the

author, Nick Yapp - he is very good on this, very dogged.

 

Yapp follows the parts major characters played in various Writers' Guild

encounters with the BBC.  Like, the case of Frisby v BBC, 1967 - about the

censorship of one line in a tv play, p 40 onwards, and the Court's

interpretation of the writers contracts, negotiated by BSTWA and the Guild,

with the BBC.  Or, Chapter 18, on censorship, p 172 onwards.  Then, page 42

onwards, the tendency of BBC commissioners to commission themselves to write

scripts - amongst the significant contributions to the long debate was a

1969 article by Allan Prior (Z Cars, Softy, Softly) called Writers Who Sell

Their Scripts to Themselves, p 44.  Or p147, the time that BBC Radio Drama

decided that it was not subject to copyright laws.  Ceaseless vigilance,

indeed.


Note too that the BBC is a major publisher of books, and often displays a

tendency to forget the original writer of a project when a book appears with

a celebrity name on the title page - witness, p 69, the 1975 book based on

the tv series, The Explorers.  A recurring problem - again of interest to

historians of the BBC - is the way that the names of writers tend to be left

off the documents that will become historians' sources.  Note, p 83, p141,

p147, the disappearance of writers' credits from the pages of the Radio

Times - the Radio Times that has become the source document for the BBC

database, which we all use...

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/

 

For a working writer the most extraordinary saga is on page 190, when in

2001, the BBC and the trade body of writers' agents came to a secret

agreement to bypass the Guild - a saga that is notably for the way in which

the Guild's representative, Bernie Corbett, held his nerve.  


Working writers, like me, also remember the weirdness of the BBC 'virtual internal

market', 1992 onwards, p 148, when it was cheaper for my colleagues within

the BBC to phone me with a query, rather than ask the BBC Library.  Paddy,

How long did the Thirty Years War last?

 

From the history, it seems to me, two things give the Writers' Guild clout -

the involvement of the screenwriters, and the fact that it is a trade union

associated with the TUC.  (Though that association was tested by the

Industrial Relations Bill 1970).  Nick Yapp pauses, a number of times, to

meditate on the Guild's relationship with the BBC - see 46 '...as the BBC

itself has come under pressure from unfriendly governments and aggressive

media rivals, the Guild has constantly worked to maintain good relations with 

Auntie, and to be sympathetic to her problems.  At the same time, however, the

Guild has always fought tooth and nail to protect the interests of writers.'

 

I am an active member of the Writers' Guild, and serve on the Books

Committee of the Guild - where one of our tasks is to bring Nick Yapp's

History up to date.  We, in the Guild, and the other creative industries

trade unions, are the experts on the 'gig economy'.  As Nick Yapp says, p

190, on new media... 'The new millennium was no place for the unprotected...

...The work of writers could now be exploited in more ways than ever before.

The attempt was made, time and again, to argue that old rules and old

contracts and old rights could not apply to new marketing fields or new

media...' 

 

Patrick O'Sullivan

May 2021

Visiting Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies, London Metropolitan University

Patrick O'Sullivan's Whole Life Blog http://www.fiddlersdog.com/

Archive https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ooj5btdttc9y4/Documents

Archives of the Irish Diaspora List, 1997-2017 http://idslist.friendsov.com/

https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/patrick-osullivan

Album https://hladowskisingsosullivan.hearnow.com/

Personal Fax 0044 (0) 709 236 9050