From cops to robbers Daily Telegraph, 09/01/2003 They offended the police with The Cops. So what do they have in store for criminals? Jasper Rees meets the writers of new TV drama Buried. Imagine a future in which technology allows you to watch the television drama you want, when you want. You will no longer be a slave to schedules and channels but, scrolling through a library of new titles, arrive at informed choices based on refined criteria: not just who's in it, or even who wrote it, but which production company made it. Already the best of them have their own house styles. For sexy northern grit you go to Red (Queer as Folk); for glossy sweeping thinkpieces to TalkBack (the forthcoming The Lost Prince). But the first to carve out a distinct signature for itself, with Between the Lines, This Life, The Cops and Attachments, was World. You know what you're getting with World: tension in and around the workplace, semaphored in wobblycam, extreme close-up, hyper-realistic dialogue. The media take World to mean one name: Tony Garnett, the veteran producer of Z Cars and Cathy Come Home. That is why no one has heard of Robert Jones and Jimmy Gardner. Between them, they devised The Cops. The BBC2 drama may have won awards galore, but the plaudits were somehow always re-routed back to World and Garnett. "Very often," says Jones, "and Tony is the first to admit this, journalists will have a shorthand - 'Tony Garnett made this or that' - and some are convinced he wrote, directed and produced it. He finds that very amusing. A show gets a huge profile because Tony's name is on it. But people sometimes think he's done absolutely everything on it." The plus side is that Garnett has what Gardner calls "an aura that scares off and intimidates broadcasters. As a writer, you've got no intrusions from half a dozen interest groups. You are only dealing with World." In other words, meddling executives trust his judgement. Jones and Gardner have followed The Cops with what might as well be called The Cons. Buried is set in a prison and, at least in the eyes of its writers, has nothing to do with their first collaboration. It has a much less shaky camera, for starters. You can hear more of the dialogue. It concentrates its attention on just one main character, Lee (played by Lennie James), in for manslaughter but fiercely protesting his innocence. There are imaginary sequences, even a sort of Greek chorus figure whose only dialogue is with Lee. Within the four walls of the prison, it's slower and almost theatrical. For the record, World have decamped to Channel 4 for this one. It's less that they've fallen out with BBC2, more that there are only so many dramas that one production company can expect to get on a channel that doesn't broadcast much drama. The one thing that's unchanged is the acuity of the writing. After The Cops was mysteriously not commissioned for a fourth series, it was Gardner who suggested a drama about the under-dramatised world of prisons. For Buried, research was much more piecemeal - they couldn't just hang out with convicts and warders the way they did with the police. "Prisons being prisons," says Jones, "we were a bit naive thinking that we could go and shadow a prison officer." "They can't quite accept the fact that you're not a journalist," says Gardner. "We did have PR problems because of The Cops. It wasn't sensationalist, but it was a bit warts-and-all. And everyone said, as long as it's not going to be like Bad Girls . . ." In the end, they got what they needed: a panoramic documentary insight rather than a random set of anecdotes to plant crudely in a story. They're chuffed that an ex-lifer has advised them that it's an accurate portrait. Their routine was the same as for The Cops. Once back in World's offices, they thrashed out storylines and character arcs with producer Cath Mattock, credited as co-creator. They came up with a bible - the world of the series, a brief plot summary and character sketches, distilled into a dozen pages - and pitched it to the broadcaster. As with The Cops, other writers were brought in only when the green light came from the channel and there was suddenly money to throw round. With more voices round the table, it was roughly established what would happen in each episode, and then writers peeled off to work alone on a more detailed storyline. Only once these had been through three or four drafts did anyone write any dialogue. Gardner wrote the first episode, Jones the second. They've never physically written together. "I don't know anybody who does that in drama," says Jones. They are something of an odd couple. Jones is reserved and schoolmasterly, while you sense that Gardner has an untamed streak. Now in their early forties, they were introduced by a producer at World. Gardner, from Edinburgh, has spent much of his career not writing scripts. He went to film school, but had to cook, drive, stack deck chairs in Bournemouth and sign on before The Bill came to his rescue. He came to World's attention and was hired to write a couple of episodes of This Life. Jones also wrote for The Bill but has a much longer CV, including the forthcoming PD James adaptation, Death in Holy Orders. His best-known original drama is Macready and Daughter, but he was less than excited by the final version. "The Cops was the first time I thought I was really getting my own voice across." It should be noted that The Cops looked and sounded nothing like they'd originally planned. Many of their choicest lines were muffled by the mock-doc style in which the microphone made no effort to catch all the dialogue. Did they resent that? "At first," concedes Gardner. "We saw a rough cut and it took a wee bit of getting used to." "There was some of that," agrees Jones. "There was a discussion about camera style which we were party to, but, once you get on set, you are not going to have much influence as a writer. It doesn't work for every moment, that's definitely true, and some things that you think really should be in there get lost in the flurry. But it brings much more to it than it loses." Between them, the two shows they have created are roughly analogous to the television writer's life. The Cops is the fun part, getting out and about and tracking down the facts. Buried compares to the long days spent anonymously stuck in a room with someone else, thinking. The oddity of their calling is not lost on the experts they consult. "Advisers sit in occasionally," says Jones, "and have often said, 'This is a really strange thing to be doing, and much more fun than my job. I have to deal with real things, and you're just making it up.' "