What a week!

Mark Doneo, leading actor and script-writer for the popular Shelly Rainer series, tells Ramona Depares about breaking the boundaries in local television

I certainly do not consider myself a writer: everything happened by chance, circumstances happened in such a way that I ended up writing for television. Which is good, because I have all these stories going round and round in my head. In fact, my wife has always pushed me to start writing but I was not sure if I could really do it. After all it’s one thing to have a story on your mind and quite another to produce it on paper.

Actually the first story I wrote, Shelly Rainer, started off that way. I had the plot on my mind and I went around telling everyone about it, fishing for reactions. When I realised that everyone liked the idea I took the plunge and produced my first script. Then Albert Marshall, at Super 1, decided to read it. His comments were very favourable and he wanted to produce it for the station immediately.

This was major decision-time for me: at the time I had a different job, working on computers, and I had to decide whether to quit that in order to take this new thing on full-time. It wasn’t an easy decision to take, I enjoyed my old job and had a decent pay. But I also discovered that I enjoyed writing. And so I committed myself completely to the new venture and today it’s become my full-time job.

Writing for television is not easy. It is not just a simple matter of writing the story as it comes, like a novelist would do. There are tons of other considerations to take and most of them having nothing to do with the writing itself. The medium is very specific and it is also completely unlike writing the script for a whole movie. Television thrives on commercial breaks: in a movie you may have one interval, towards the middle of the script. When dealing with a series it’s a completely different kettle of fish, there are about five commercial breaks and the script-writer had to keep them in mind when writing. Whether dealing with sit-coms or drama series, I keep the commercial-breaks in mind. Let’s face it, when the commercial breaks come up most people end up either making a cup of coffee, going to the bathroom or just zapping. My job is to prevent that. If people do not watch the commercials, the station naturally suffers… So I make sure that my cliff-hangers – that is, the last scene before breaking off for publicity shots – keep the audience glued to their seat. There has to be a certain tension to achieve this. I try to pick up on people’s curiosity, make them unwilling to miss even two minutes of the series.

Where do I get the inspiration for my series? I don’t know. All I know is that when I’m writing I need complete peace and quiet, as well as all the time I can spare. I just sit there in the darkness, concentrating, jotting down notes… sometimes, if I don’t have the opening line, the whole scene gets stuck and I cannot go on. What I do usually is come up with a premise, such as a murder scene, and then build backwards from there. Writing a series is a bit like playing God, you know everyone’s destiny. The important thing is to keep the characters three-dimensional. I want my characters to be real, this is why I’m always pleased when people stop me to comment about how "real-life" the protagonists are.

I am indeed obsessed with this point, because I am aware of how important this is for good television. I was reared on a diet on English thrillers and crime series, Ruth Rendell has always been one of my favourites. The question I always ended up asking myself after watching an English series was the following: what makes the foreign TV characters so real? What do they have that is different from the Maltese characters? And it was always the same answer that came back to me: the dialogue.

Dialogue too, has to be real. We cannot have the actors using words and phrases that are not really used in everyday life. The script should always be based on the colloquial. If the Maltese are more used to saying Good Night, rather Il-Lejl it-Tajjeb, there’s no good reason why we have to use the Maltese version. It will just not sound credible in the actors’ mouths. I still remember watching a particular series when I was a child and thinking to myself that real people never speak in that manner. When I first started writing I remembered this particular incident and resolved never to fall into that trap myself. I’d rather sacrifice grammatical accuracy and have a real-life effect. The truth is that people rarely bother about grammer when they are chatting, they often leave off sentences mid-way, go back to an earlier topic etc.

To try and get this effect I often stage my conversations, either with my wife or – if she’s unavailable – I end up talking to the wall. But I have to know what they sound like. Flexibility is essential in this job. I cannot fall in love with a particular phrase and refuse to change it no matter what. A different sentence may sound better from an actor’s mouth, or the commercial breaks will dictate a shorter speech perhaps. But I have to move according to the TV’s exigencies.

Something that did at first create a bit of a rumpus with my dialogue was the fact that I have used some four-letter words. Now this issue of vulgarities is rather strange: I remember that the Broadcasting Authority allowed two particular words to pass because they had already been used previously. Then when it came to the third one we were fined some Lm150 because, they said, the word had never been used before… I don’t understand this. We appealed and when the Authority realised that we had an "offensive language" warning prior to airing the series, they decided that a fine was unnecessary. Of course, I am sensitive to children watching the show, I have a responsibility that they do not end up hearing something they should not. Which is why I always insist on the little red circle at the bottom of the screen when Shelly Rainer is being aired. And when there’s a repeat in the afternoon I bleep out all offensive words, because I am aware that it is highly probable that children will be watching TV at that time, regardless of the red circle.

But I do try to avoid using bad language. Which is why there aren’t many fight scenes in the series, because certain scenes just would not be credible without certain language being used. So I just avoid them. But I honestly believe that four-letter words are acceptable if they make sense in that particular situation. You have to take them in contest, that’s all. Not everyone reacts the same to them either. I’ve had a sixty-year-old compliment me on the standard of the series. But then his wife said that she didn’t enjoy it because of the type of language used! People are different.

The script for Shelly Rainer is completely ready, we just have to film the final scene. I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the finale, making it more spectacular… we’ll see. Then I’ll start working on L-Ispettur Lowell, which will start as a proper series in October. We’ll have to film the episodes in the height of Summer, which isn’t much fun for the actors. But that’s just part of the job, I guess!