When the BBC screened a tribute documentary to mark the 20th anniversary of its schools series Grange Hill, the show ended with a sequence revealing the subsequent careers of some of the creative team: writer Phil Redmond was running Brookside and Hollyoaks, actors Susan Tully and Todd Carty were in EastEnders, and so on. Then there was an astonishing pay-off. Anthony Minghella was shown receiving one of the nine Oscars won by his movie The English Patient. Minghella had started his career as script editor on Grange Hill before writing some of the early episodes of Inspector Morse.
Viewers of the documentary may have found Minghella's journey mildly ironic but, for people in the television business, it was an expression of their absolute dream. Almost every writer and director in TV keeps an Oscar acceptance speech - metaphorical or, in extreme cases, actual - in their overnight bag.
Next week, two more British television talents - Amy Jenkins and Sam Miller, deviser-writer and director respectively of BBC2's landmark drama This Life - begin their hopeful journey to LA with a debut movie, Elephant Juice. They are likely, however, to be arrested at critical customs. Its release delayed for almost two years, Elephant Juice has been the subject of a whispering campaign far more damaging than anything Mo Mowlam experienced.
If they fail to make the transition from British television to international cinema, Jenkins and Miller will be in brilliant company. Dennis Potter - the most original homegrown dramatist to grace our TV screens - flopped when he aimed for Hollywood. His unwatched or unreleased films include Secret Friends and Midnight Movie. Two of our best stage and television writers - Willy Russell (Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine) and Alan Bleasdale (Boys from the Blackstuff, GBH) - are represented in cinema reference books by their least satisfactory works: Bleasdale's No Surrender and Russell's Driving Thru the Dark. Kay Mellor has shown fine judgment of what television viewers want - her hits include Playing the Field and Band of Gold - but Mellor's cinema debut, Fanny and Elvis, notably failed to persuade anyone to switch off the box and head for the multiplex.
My use of the authorial possessive apostrophe (Mellor's, Bleasdale's, Russell's) before those films identifies the main obstacle on the path from small screen to large. The first reason why so many exchange students from British television fail to make the grade in movie school is the difference in attitude towards the writer. British television has traditionally been a writer's medium - people would speak of "the new Dennis Potter serial" or "the latest Alan Bennett" - while in Hollywood, the writer is merely a low rung on the director's ladder to success.
The culture shock for writers is equivalent to being taken from the family home and installed in an orphanage. Major television writers here expect to be consulted if a line is changed. Cinema scripts are routinely taken away from their creators and given to fresh writers or emergency dialogue doctors. Even the premise of this article is indicative of the cultural gulf. It would bewilder most Americans that Elephant Juice is being sold as an Amy Jenkins film. With rare exceptions, such as the maverick self-publicist Joe Eszterhas, writer of Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge and Showgirls, the scriptwriter is only visible in cinema in the case of writer/directors like the Coen brothers or Woody Allen.
The second limitation is scale. Movie producers used traditionally to complain that British television writers - schooled in 75-minute pieces dominated by domestic interiors - were unable to think big enough for the two-hour, multi-location movie.
There is some justification in this objection, and the step up to long trousers has been made more difficult by the popularity in Britain of the hybrid film, largely funded by television and intended to end up there. This system has created hits - Four Weddings and a Funeral being the most notable - but too many of these films fail to appreciate the quite different expectations, visually and dramatically, of the viewer with a TV dinner on their knee and the cinemagoer with a bucket of popcorn in their lap.
In fact, for many of the scriptwriters who have tried to make the transition, the problem is that the cinematic canvas is too small. For all the significance in television history of the single play - including work by Jack Rosenthal and Alan Bennett - for most of the other major small-screen dramatists - Potter, Bleasdale, Jimmy McGovern, Lynda La Plante, Lucy Gannon - their greatest achievements have been with the serial which fills six or more hours of screen time. They are writers for whom a movie script feels a little short.
In the case of Amy Jenkins's Elephant Juice, it must be significant that This Life only made a serious impact after 15 or more hours had been broadcast. The later episodes depended, like most television series, on our knowledge of the characters' past and a sense of how they would respond in any given situation. Our relationship with the people in a TV series is like being at school with them: we can get to know them over time. A film script is like falling in love on a train or a plane: introductions and revelations are accelerated. Like many works by television talents, Elephant Juice, in its leisurely pace and low-key developments, feels like a pilot for a mooted series. (For Jenkins, another complicating factor is that she personally wrote only a small percentage of the scripts for This Life.)
The final restriction is what might be called the Linguaphone difficulty. Because movies are essentially an American medium, writers from British TV who try to break into films will usually be typing in a second language. Harold Pinter wrote many fine screenplays in highly literate English - among them The Go-Between, The Servant and The French Lieutenant's Woman - but has had far fewer credits since cinema became increasingly American.
In the 60s and 70s, as television became a mass medium, it was common for parents to warn their children that, if they watched TV, they would never get a decent job. Whether or not this was generally true, it has certainly proved to be the case for would-be screenwriters.
