Writer and producer Paul Abbott, one of Britain’s best and most successful screenwriters, is to become a regular contributor to movieScope magazine. Starting with the March/April 2008 edition, he will contribute a two-page article in the magazine’s CRAFT section, centred on writing for the screen. 

Abbott has always been a controversial, as well as a respected, critic of Britain’s screen industries, calling for television drama producers – normally risk-averse in their approach, to take more risks with their commissions, both with content and with new writers. He has made a point of championing new writers by opening his own screenwriting academy.

Growing up within a large family in Burnley, Lancashire and later deserted by both parents, Abbott and his brothers and sisters fended for themselves rather than being taken into care. Years later this provided a rich source of material for his TV drama seven-parter Shameless (Channel 4, 2004.) As a schoolboy, Abbott was brutally raped on the way home and he was sectioned at age 16 from school but by the age of 23, his writing for Radio 4 had been noticed by Granada bosses and he found himself working as story editor for the soap opera Coronation Street, where he was to work for ten years.

Full story on movieScope 

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