UK bodies hope negotiations will protect members.
By Peter John Meiklem, Media Correspondent

JONATHAN Ross may claim to be worth every penny of his reported £6 million per year salary, but Auntie's highest-paid presenter would struggle without his writers. In the absence of his small team of backroom boys and girls, even a host as silver-tongued as Ross would be, well, gagging for gags.

For confirmation, we need only look across the pond. In the US, the Writers Guild of America's (WGA) three-month-long strike has left many of the country's favourite talkshow hosts stuck up a creek without a paddle. Beyond the talkshow chaos, the Golden Globes awards ceremony was cancelled last month and the production of high-profile TV shows such as Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, and films including the new Superman sequel, have been interrupted.

Yesterday, the WGA said it reached a "tentative deal" with studios that would be put to members. "While this agreement is neither perfect nor perhaps all that we deserve for the countless hours of hard work and sacrifice, our strike has been a success," WGA West president Patric Verrone and WGA East president Michael Winship said in a memo.

The strike began in November after writers lost patience with the studios, intially for not offering proper payment for DVD sales. It then developed into a row over new technology as studios claimed downloading or streaming television over the internet was so new they couldn't work out how to make a profit from it and were therefore unable to pay writers for showing their work.

Three painful months later, the WGA has to decide whether to accept the new deal from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the body that represents the entertainment industry, including both the film studios and network broadcasters like CBS, ABC and Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox.

Although details are subject to the news blackout, reports from the US suggest that the studios have negotiated a 17 to 24-day window within which material can be streamed online without the need for extra payments.

Insiders hope the deal will safeguard the rights of writers to a reasonable share of the money made from DVD sales and give them a share of cash generated from content available through the internet, mobile phones and so forth.

While most of us in this country have been content to search for our favourite stars pouting on the picket line, British screenwriters have been following the strike's progress in much more detail. This is because the technological heart of the argument is just as big an issue here, and the UK's screenwriters have been negotiating furiously to make sure the mistakes made in America are not repeated.

Tracy Brabin, a London screenwriter for seven years who has worked on Hollyoaks and Heartbeat and is currently working on the new series of Channel 4 comedy hit Shameless, says the strike has raised writers' profiles to a level they are not used to.

She says: "Not everybody realises that for 99% of what they see on television, from a drama programme to what the contestants say on Have I Got News For You, there is somebody sitting in a room scribbling away.

"It all comes out of someone's head, and people realise that now When you take away people's favourite programmes they sit up and take notice."

Brabin says screenwriters in the UK have been refusing to take advantage of the extra work that has been offered from American producers.

"There's support in the UK, for sure. This is about hundreds of billions of dollars and we all think it's extraordinary that it hasn't reached some kind of resolution before now," she says.

Although outwardly glamorous, industry insiders say much of the screenwriting work in Britain is anything but. While the top people, such as Richard E Curtis or Jimmy McGovern, are stars in their own right and are paid accordingly, they are in a tiny minority among the 20,000 people estimated to be writing scripts at present.

Philip McGrade, a Glasgow-raised comedy writer based in California who produces gags for US television's Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, calls British screenwiting a "cottage industry".

Where in America teams of writers are hired as staff to work on the best shows, British writers beaver away alone in converted garden sheds on a freelance basis. And while writers earn £8000 for an episode of a soap opera like Eastenders, the work is nowhere near steady, with Tracy Brabin estimating the average income for a screenwriter to be about £10,000 per annum.

On the other hand, it is not all glum for the UK screenwriter. Hundreds of new people enter the profession every year and Scottish Screen, the BBC and Channel 4 have a remit to encourage new talent and do so through competitions and writing schools on the web.

For those good enough to be offered work there is also a clear career path, with new writers serving their time on daytime dramas such as the BBC's Doctors before being moved on to higher-profile peak-time dramas and soaps.

James Doherty, a writer on Scottish soap River City, says many find work just by watching their favourite show closely and sending in ideas. "That's what I used to do and I have seen that work many times," he says. "Then again, it's not as lucrative as people think. If a producer doesn't like you or you hand in a few below-par scripts, then it's not hard to find yourself working in call centres again."

Doherty says the events in America have focused minds in this country in a way they might not have been before. He says writers are reasonably happy with the deals currently being struck with TV producers - the BBC, for instance, pays an extra 15% on the initial fee so that shows can be re-broadcast on their iPlayer - but with technology changing all the time, writers are wary they could lose out at any moment. With audiences and advertising revenues also constantly shifting, they are keeping a close eye on developments.

For this reason, he says that the kind of action that has floored Hollywood is unlikely in the UK, but that nobody is taking anything for granted.

"There does seem to be a willingness on behalf of the producers here to make sure writers get a share," he says.

With online broadcasting also available through ITV.com, 4OD on Channel 4 and over mobile phones and other mobile devices, observers say persistence is the only way to make sure writers are not hoodwinked out of proper payment.

Insiders say the American strike was at least in part caused by the WGA's failure to get a good deal on video sales in past negotiaions. Having failed to be diligent on one occasion, it set a bad precedent for future developments.

Bernie Corbett, general secretary of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, has led negotiations with the BBC and the commercial channels over technological developments. He says there will be no strike here because the union has kept pace with change, continually negotiating rather than getting caught off guard. He says this has resulted in some reasonable deals, although he concedes that technology is changing so fast that there is no such thing as a hard and fast deal. "For example, in our negotiations with ITV we've parked the issue of showing programmes on the internet until the end of the year. We want to see how it works out for them," he says.

McGrade believes that this could be a dangerous approach. "The attitude in America has been capitalism 101. They would tell us that they don't really know how this stuff was going to make money, which wasn't true at all. And what happens in America happens in the UK, only a few years later. We will see if they try the same bullshit excuses."

At the very least, that should serve as a warning to screenwriters not to get complacent. Maybe Jonathan Ross shouldn't put his joke book away just yet.