Skins:

So, is anyone hear to defend Naomi?

Ed Hime – Writer of Episode 2

This episode of Skins was my first proper TV job. I'd worked mostly in theatre before, where you work alone, write exactly want you want to write, and hardly anyone ever gets to see it. TV is different, and Skins is completely different - it's written in a team, and watched by millions.  

The Skins writers' room is not for the faint of heart. You sit in a circle with a load of clever people, try not to eat all the doughnuts, and wonder why the windows don't open in the middle of June. And you talk about the things you care about, the things you've lived and haven't seen on TV before, the things that can make Skins so much more dangerous than any other show like it. You speak and listen and consider and argue and wait for your turn and not wait for your turn and shout and laugh and occasionally seethe with frustration. To an outsider I imagine it looks like a cross between group therapy and a late night debate in the House of Commons. It's brilliant.

Then there's the fans. I started at Skins as Series Three was airing, decided I wanted to write for Emily.....and then watched Naomily become a bona-fide phenomenon. Woo-hoo! A global audience of millions! Then the terror set in.

The more I thought of all the assembled Naomily fans, who had invested so much love and hope in them, the more I felt a paralysing mixture of fear, duty, and a desperate need to impress. It was kind of like when you meet your girlfriend's parents for the first time- “I know you love her, and I love her too, but I'm going to be doing some things with her that you probably won't approve of”.  Cos I wanted to write about the dark side of Naomily. What happens after you've got the girl and walked off into the sunset? Being in love is no guarantee against suffering. And - if the accumulated wisdom of six decades of pop music is anything to go by - it usually means that there's a whole lot of pain coming your way.

So with the blessing (and assistance) of the group, I wrote a Skins film-noir, with Emily cast as the intrepid detective. I can't say exactly why, except that I love detective stories, and the traits that people love about Emily -  her purity, intelligence, bravery and tenacity - are also the traits that make a great private eye. And the warning at the core of every good detective story is: Be careful where you go digging, because you don't know what you'll find.
 

When I discovered that Skins would be using an illustrator to tell the story of Naomi's affair, I realised that this would be a crucial part of the Skins series 4 story. After all, Emily and Naomi are one of Skins' most popular couples, and Sophia's suicide would act as a crucible for the characters in Skins 4: their hedonism suddenly has consequences they have to deal with.

I wanted this series of Skins to play out on the website - your comments and reactions happen in real time as the drama develops each year so I felt the design of the site should reflect this. 

What better way to do this than to use the same illustrator responsible for Sophia's drawings on the show and repurpose Sophia's drawings for the website so that it looks like everything's been affected? Step forward Lydia Starkey (who also worked on the illustrations for Sophia's video), who also created bespoke images for us, so it's almost as if the website's been drawn by Sophia. Spooky. 

Below is how Lydia got involved with Skins (from Lydia herself). I hope you like what we've done. 

Layla 

Website Editor 

 

www.lydiastarkey.com

I'm 23, I graduated from University of the West of England in Bristol last June. Little did I know at my final Illustration exhibition, the Art Directors at Company Pictures were browsing to choose someone to work as Sophia for the new Skins series?

I love to draw! My work is mainly observational line drawing, with pens, ink and watercolour. I stylised my visual language to suit Sophia's character and emotional situation.

Company Pictures approached me about the ideas they had and I was really excited to get involved in such an interesting project. I worked mainly on the set from the script adding my own ideas and bouncing off ideas from the team.

An overall amazing experience!

Lydia 

Our Skins 4 music man Kyle Lynd has been through all of the tracks you sent so far and was impressed with loads of your music (more of that coming soon) - so much that two acts have been used this Saturday's Skins House closing party. The bands are: 

Dial F For Frankenstein and The Boy I Used to Be

Will you be there on Saturday? Tell us what you think of them live please, and be sure to check out their music as well

Layla

Skins returned with tv ratings as high as its' series 1 debut - thanks everyone! And this doesn't include the online catch up figures which haven't been collected as yet...

I'm still a little overwhelmed by all of the comments here and twitter (positive and negative they all count), as well as the tv reviews (here's just a few):

'Masterpiece' - The Telegraph)
'it's the mature and believable performance from Merveille Lukeba, as Thomas, that steals the show' - The Guardian
'Brilliant' - Heat 

Thanks all. There are more exclusive pictures coming from episode 1 very soon, as well as more interviews and other great stuff. 

Roll on next week's ep, where Naomily take centre stage...

Skins = legal high

Layla 

x

 

 

 

 

It feels like episode 1 has been forever in the making. Mainly because this was the one where we offered 300 of you the chance to be part of an opening scene. And what an opener it was. Thumping music, hedonism and tragedy; and all without a word being spoken. Sophia's moment in Skins may have been fleeting, but it certainly didn't lack impact.

In a moving and intense first episode, Thomas questioned his identity and culture as he tried to find his place, balancing a home life with it's own stresses and his position in among his friends. Thomas discovered two wrongs don't make a right, and was left almost as lost as when we found him. Will he find his way? 

What were your thoughts on your first offering from series 4? 

Layla

Jamie Brittain – Writer of Episode 1

When myself, Lucy Kirkwood, Ben Schiffer and Neil Duncan went away to a hotel near Newmarket in the winter of 2008 to come up with series 4 of Skins, we had no idea what we were going to propose. We found that despite series 3 ending on a definite note for some characters, an ambiguous note for others, we had reached a point where we could literally take them anywhere.

 

So when we started talking about how the new series might start, we entertained, discussed and abandoned many, many scenarios. Weddings, festivals, road trips. All were discussed, all were thrown out. But one idea that emerged, the idea of a death opening the series seemed perfect – landing smack back in our laps and issuing a challenge. But we decided it should be a previously unseen character. These anonymous deaths seem to affect many youngsters (including myself) at some point.

 

I knew I wanted to write about Thomas, and wanted to write about him early in the series. We felt the character was slightly underused in series 3 and wanted to rectify that.  We put the two things together. Thomas would be ep 1.

 

When I started to write the episode itself, I simply began writing with little idea where I was going. I wrote many drafts, very different from each other. All explored ideas of faith and identity. None satisfied me, or the execs, or the script editor, but we couldn’t work out why.

 

Then we did work it out. I was having trouble ‘feeling’ the ep – relating to it. Previous episodes I’ve written – this sounds like an awful cliché but it’s the best way of saying it– came from the heart

(you can read that as ‘balls’ if you want to be less sentimental). They were all cathartic processes about stuff that was going on in my life. With this script, I found myself more balanced and optimistic than ever before, but this, annoyingly, had stolen some of my mojo.

 

Thomas is a black, 17 year old Christian African. I’m a 24 year old, white, middle class Atheist. It would be hard for us to be more different. This was another problem. So I started to think about what we had in common. We’re both from fragmented origins, unsure of the location of our home. We both struggle to see the amazing things life has provided for us. We both have trouble with trust, and faith, and authority. From then on I started to build a story that I, and hopefully the fans, would care about and enjoy.

 

I have been accused by some of writing scripts that are too conceptual – scripts driven by my own warped interpretations of psychological or philosophical theories. You might have noticed that last year, my script (Cook) kicked against this, attempting to be a visceral, hedonistic non-stop teenage rampage with little time to stop and think. This time I hoped to do a more classic ‘Skins’ ep – emotional, funny, complex. And I realized my key was Pandora. A favourite character of mine (and the actress who plays her, Lisa – a favourite person), she commands the love and respect of many, by her fellow characters and by the fans. It was upon the tension between her and Thomas, and their eventual break up that I could hang the emotional crux of the episode, empowering and justifying the discussion about faith and identity that characterises it and ultimately leads to the break up itself. When I worked out that, the ep came alive in my hands.

 

One of the fun things about the episode is that I got to introduce a new recurring adult character. We knew we wanted a new college director. I knew I wanted Chris Addison to play him – if you don’t know his work on radio and TV I suggest you Google him right now. I’d met Chris at the British Comedy Awards last year, and, though I was starstruck I managed to ask him if he was interested. He said he was – he’d enjoyed his ‘Thick Of It’ co-star Peter Capaldi’s work (Sid’s Dad) and fancied a bit himself. So all was set.

 

But what to call him? He needed a good name. I mulled it over for hours and finally decided – David Blood. Now, if I’m proud of anything in my career, it’s coming up with that name. Doesn’t the character just come alive when you hear it? Maybe I’m the only one who sees my true genius here.

 

I hope you enjoyed the episode. It would be lying to say I enjoyed writing it – writing is never really much fun – but I’m proud of it and hope you think we are continuing to do the show and characters justice. And if you think my ep was intense, just wait for next week’s. That’s right…it’s time for Naomily, and we’re just warming up.

 

 

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...

Pictures from the read through
 

 

Skins starts in 11.5 hours at the time of writing this. It feels like you lot have been waiting for this since 26th March 2009 at 11pm (GMT) when series 3 came to a close. This is because you have. You've been hungry for it since it ended, begging for new stuff, and the teeniest tiniest morsel of skins 4 gossip.

It's been painful, watching you all beg like that, like some junkie going cold turkey. I'm very excited you almost get to see that blinder of an opening episode. It really is something that will have you sat up and fully attentive. I'm aware this blog is making you all sound like dogs so I will stop now and will end it here:

Everyone at Skins wants to know what you're planning for tonight. How many of you are gathering at someone's house, and throwing your very own Skins Premiere party? How many of you are so excited you're on our homepage pressing refresh and twittering fervently in a manner similar to JJ when he's locked on? We want to know. And we want to make sure you enjoy it the best way possible. Because the opening scene is another legendary offering. This time, it's in a club, involves some of you people (who responded to our ad on this site asking for fans to get involved) and a Fat Segal track so epic that turned up on a halfway decent soundsystem Bryan Elsley himself reckons it will feel "like a monkey climbing up your large intestine...in a good way", and we all want that sensation at least once in our lives. So turn it up. Louder. And enjoy. And then come back here and tell us how it went. 

Layla

There's a Luke interview in the new issue of GT (Gay Times) on sale today (27th January). 

 

In a thoroughly good read he discusses BAFTA wins, Naomily and kissing Jack. But my favourite bit is this juicy nugget: 

“He [the director] got us all breaking our personal space barriers by kissing, touching and playing games. We were blindfolded and we had to guess who had just touched or kissed us.”

 

WTF??