The never ending story
TELEVISION: Heartbreak, crying babies, love triangles – it’s all happening in Carrigstown when PATRICK FREYNE, who once wrote storylines for ‘Fair City’, goes behind the scenes at the soap
IN THE FAKE Spar shop in the studio set of Fair City, some of the oranges are real and some are fake. Gordon Spiering, the friendly production assistant who is showing me around the set, seems a bit perplexed by this himself. “There’s probably some reason for that,” he says, but sounds doubtful. We wander around the shop, a three-sided set with no fourth wall, checking what else is real or fake. The wine seems real. The yogurt cartons are empty. The cheese is real. “But you probably wouldn’t want to eat it,” says Spiering, lest I try.
Fair City has been spinning stories about the residents of the fictional north Dublin suburb of Carrigstown for 23 years. For all this time, the creators have been meshing the real with the unreal (though the Spar shop was only added last year as part of a product-placement deal).
“Carrigstown is a little bit like Brigadoon,” says executive producer Brigie De Courcy. De Courcy worked for the show a decade ago and returned in 2008 after successful stints on Emmerdale and EastEnders. “It’s tucked in somewhere between Phibsboro and Drumcondra and on a clear day you might find it.” Started as an urban counterpoint to the rural Glenroe in 1989, Fair City was not an instant success. It was nearly cancelled after its first six months under the guidance of EastEnders co-creator Tony Holland. “He just didn’t have the Irish thing,” says Tony Tormey, who has been playing Fair City’s lothario, Paul Brennan, since the shows inception.
“The scripts were all in a different idiom. They were written in Londonese rather than Dublinese. It just didn’t work so they cancelled it. But they stuck with it and brought Mary Halpin in. It was almost like starting again.”
Fair City is now broadcast four nights a week, a feature-film’s worth of drama. It’s one of the most-watched programmes on Irish television with juicily melodramatic plots about affairs, rivalries, spousal abuse and psychotic secret bunnyboilers (like Lucy, aka Lorna Quinn, whose obsession with the Molloy family came to a head this week).
The invention of such shenanigans requires a story factory in the heart of RTÉ. There’s an open-plan office with a screen showing the action being filmed in the lot and studio below. There is also a writing room with a glass wall but no natural light, nicknamed – depending on who you ask – Guantánamo Bay or The Goldfish Bowl. Downstairs, there’s another story room. This room is more familiar to me than the set. I wrote a story for Fair City for six weeks or so in 2009.
“Everybody loves telling stories and are curious about other people’s lives,” says De Courcy. “We all have a desire to see enacted all the terrible things we hope are never going to happen to us. In ancient Greece people left the theatre saying ‘thank goodness that’s never going to happen to me. I’m never going to be a king and have someone pluck out my eyes’. Soap is absolutely the same except we’re now watching our neighbours.” De Courcy likens Bella Doyle, with his three daughters, to King Lear.
“One is a king and his field of vision is enormous and one is a man who lives in a two-up-two-down in Carrigstown. We’re telling big, big stories with small, real people.” But even Shakespeare, hack though he was, wasn’t producing two hours of drama a week. On Fair City, the writing process is divided into “script” and “story”. Story-writers work in a group to come up with weeks of story lines, which are eventually put together as “dramatic beats” and given to individual scriptwriters to be fleshed out into dialogue.
Down in the story room, there are four white boards across which four weeks of story are summarised. Each day is represented by a strip of four plots – sentences written in green, red, blue and black marker – an A story (the big story of the episode), two B stories and a C story (usually a lighter yarn). Each story needs a “hook”, a tantalising enticement to come back after the break, and a “cliff” a suspenseful ending that will pull viewers back the next day. At the exit of the room there’s a big red bin with a special lock, where all notes can be disposed of securely so that no story developments are leaked. On another wall there are a series of cards printed with the working titles of stories, underneath which are headshots of various actors. On a third wall a white board lists all the actors available for the weeks in question. The weeks in question are next April.
“You find yourself wishing your life away in this job,” says series consultant Gareth Philips. “I felt Christmasy when we were writing the Christmas storylines months ago.” Philips has worked on Coronation Street and Hollyoaks, so as De Courcy says, between the two of them “they have all the soaps covered”. He uses the word “soaptastic” when describing particularly compelling storylines.