Get Your Hero Up a Tree: A BBC Screenwriter's Complete Guide to Writing a Script That Works

She Started as a Receptionist. Then Became a Music Video Director. Then a BBC Drama Producer.

Barbara Jane Mackie grew up in a family steeped in television drama — her father was Philip Mackie, one of Britain's most celebrated television dramatists. Precisely because of that, she spent her twenties deliberately trying to do something different, something that was hers. She ended up directing music videos, running a fringe theatre company, and eventually almost by accident becoming one of the BBC's key drama developers.

She studied Drama at Hull University alongside Anthony Minghella, who would go on to write and direct The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain. At university she helped form a comedy fringe group with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson — the pair who went on to create The Young Ones and found Alternative Comedy. She managed their early shows at the Tramshed Theatre in Woolwich, London.

Her first professional job was at a commercials company answering phones, which she hated, but absorbing how a production machine actually works. She progressed to producing documentaries for Channel 4 during the channel's anarchic early years, when it was commissioning from unknown production companies and taking risks nobody else would. She enjoyed it, but still felt she was circling the thing she actually wanted to do.

At around thirty, a neighbour who worked for the BBC mentioned they needed script readers. She took the job — badly paid, but formative. You read scripts, write a synopsis and a report, and tell the editor above you whether it's worth pursuing. You're filtering a flood of material upward. She got so busy with it she was reading for multiple BBC departments simultaneously. After about a year she was offered two positions at the BBC — one in London, one in Birmingham. She chose Birmingham.

BBC Birmingham — Where the Real Development Work Happened

At BBC Birmingham, Barbara became a script editor — a role she'd never formally done before, but learned on the job working alongside established BBC writers. The role of a script editor in British television is specific: you're a second pair of eyes on every script, a diplomatic diplomat between the writer's vision and the broadcaster's needs, and a filter that passes the best material upward toward the producers and commissioners who will fund it.

At BBC Birmingham she devised the police drama series Dangerfield, which ran for four seasons on BBC One. She script edited the crime drama Dalziel & Pascoe — the long-running BBC series based on Reginald Hill's novels, which ran for twelve series from 1996 to 2007 and attracted up to ten million viewers at its peak. She also produced the BBC film Bad Company, which won at the Chicago Film Festival.

From script editor she moved to BBC drama producer — her own projects developed with writers she'd worked with, taken through to production. At the BBC this transition was possible because the money was already there. Unlike independent production, a BBC drama producer doesn't have to raise finance — a significant luxury that shapes how you think about the job.

Leaving the BBC, Finding a Voice, and Learning What Not to Do on a First Script

After her second maternity leave Barbara made a decision: producing was interesting but it wasn't the thing she loved most. Writing was. She had already quietly developed an agent relationship — she'd shown a half-hour comedy script to two people, the second loved it, and representation followed. That foundation gave her the confidence to go freelance.

Her first major freelance commission was Wobble — a six-part comedy drama series set in a sex therapy practice, commissioned by her former BBC boss who wanted something cheap and contained (all interior locations, small cast). Two episodes, storylines, and a Bible were commissioned. It spent years in development, never got made, and is now being sent to the BBC again decades later with new interest. This, Barbara emphasised, is completely normal.

Her first commissioned screenplay, Mimi, was funded by the European Script Fund. She looks back on it now and can see where the structure collapsed — it started well, carried through to the halfway point, then faltered because she hadn't done a proper scene-by-scene breakdown before writing. It was a classic first screenplay mistake. But it brought her to the attention of Working Title Films and won her a better agent than she'd had before.

Her Western screenplay Cowboy Girls — about two young Irish women crossing America by wagon train in the 1880s, dressed as male cowhands to find work and freedom — was developed with her screenplay mentor Anthony Minghella through his production company Mirage Enterprises. Minghella, who had been her fellow student at Hull University, read the script and was enthusiastic. His quote about it is on her website and CV to this day. He died in 2008, before the film could be made.

Who's Your Agent? And What to Do If You Don't Have One

Producers and agents run the business of film and drama. That's the direct truth. If a script arrives from an agent or an entertainment lawyer, it already has a stamp of approval — someone credible has already filtered it. Without that, you're starting from a much harder position.

Barbara is currently between agents and working with an entertainment lawyer — an alternative that carries similar weight with commissioners and Netflix. If you have a strong script and can't get an agent, approaching an entertainment lawyer is a legitimate route. Productions will take the approach seriously.

Get Your Hero Up a Tree. Then Throw Rocks.

Barbara uses a saying she was given years ago as her anchor for thinking about story structure. It's worth writing down.

The three-act structure she described applies to feature films and is the underlying shape of most dramatic storytelling in English-language film and television. For a two-hour film, the rough proportions are: Act One 25%, Act Two 50%, Act Three 25%. A 90-minute British film compresses these proportions accordingly.

TV Series vs Feature Film — The Key Difference

A film is a single story with a clear ending. A TV series is ongoing storylines — characters in a world that keeps generating story rather than resolving it. For a series you need what Barbara calls a Show Bible: the document that contains all character backstories, everything that has happened in the series to date, and where the story is heading. It's a living document, continuously updated, and essential for bringing new writers into an established world. On long-running series, someone on the team is maintaining it every day.

Her Complete Process — From Character to Scene Breakdown to Dialogue

Barbara is clear that her process evolved significantly over her career. Her early scripts — including her first commissioned screenplay — suffered because she sat down and started writing dialogue too soon. She's now disciplined about the order of operations, which she shared in detail.

• 1

  Start with character — spend real time here

  Know your main character completely before you write a word of script. Four or five pages on them: their background, class, education, childhood, what they want, what they're afraid of, what stops them, how they speak, what makes them laugh. Supporting characters too — less detail but still real. This is not optional and cannot be rushed. Expect to spend weeks on this.

• 2

  Know your world

  Where does the story take place? What is the specific, textured environment your character inhabits? If you've lived it, use it. If you haven't, research it until you can. An unconvincing world undermines everything built on top of it. Be specific — not "a café in Barcelona" but this particular café, with these particular people, these particular pressures.

• 3

  Know your ending

  Decide this before you build the scene breakdown. The ending defines the genre and gives you the destination you're structuring toward. Without it you're building a road with no destination.

• 4

  Write the scene-by-scene breakdown — expect three months

  This is the hardest and most important structural work. One small paragraph per scene. No dialogue. Just: what happens, why it matters, how it moves the story forward. Cut and paste endlessly until the shape is right. Most professional writers will spend three to four months on this before touching the script. It is the slog — and if you skip it, the script will collapse.

• 5

  Show the breakdown to others before writing the script

  Get trusted feedback on the structure before you invest months writing dialogue. A structural problem is much cheaper to fix at the breakdown stage than in a third draft.

• 6

  Now write the dialogue — and enjoy it

  This is the reward for all the preparation. If you know your characters well enough, the dialogue writes itself. You're not thinking about what they'd say — you know. It flows. This is the icing on the cake, and it should feel like that.

Write What You Know — Or Go and Know It

Every project Barbara described in this session came from a direct encounter with real life. Not from an abstract idea, but from meeting a person, reading a book, attending a festival, seeing a documentary and thinking: there's a film in that.

The Last Chance Mommas started when she saw an all-female punk tribute band at the Isle of Wight Festival and was struck by how the three lead singers looked glamorous, mid-forties, as if they'd really lived. She tracked them down, met with them, listened to their stories, and heard one of them describe an abusive marriage and a daughter she'd given up at birth. The film's emotional core came from that afternoon in Manchester.

Cowboy Girls started with a book she read about women who went West in the 1880s — young, mostly poor, many of them barely surviving the wagon trains across America. She then researched how Irish immigrants spoke in New York in the 1880s, because it had to sound real. Anthony Minghella noticed.

Rumpy Pumpy — her stage musical, now a commissioned screenplay — came from a Channel 4 documentary about two Women's Institute members, Jean and Shirley, who went on a worldwide search for the perfect legal brothel after seeing sex workers getting into strangers' cars near Southampton. She tracked the real women down and spent time with them. She made it a musical because she wanted everyone — not just those who'd already decided the subject was important — to want to come and see it.

When she was teaching screenwriting to undergraduates at Portsmouth and Southampton Solent universities, she would encounter students writing stylised crime dramas set in the Bronx — worlds they'd never seen, based on other films rather than life. She made them stop. She asked about their own lives. And every single one of them, once they started talking, had extraordinary material: fractured families, illness, poverty, love, failure, things worth writing about. Write from that. The authenticity is already there.

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