Sometimes the writers work on a draft together, with one of them sitting at the computer and others suggesting dialogue, and sometimes they work on different drafts individually. Elizabeth, the producer, works closely with each of the writers on all of the drafts. In the television industry scripts usually go through four drafts and a polish – our process is slightly more organic than that... we have done up to 13 drafts of a script!
These drafts also receive feedback from the Producer, Script Consultant and Network Executive. We do as many read-throughs as possible, both to time the script – which is one of the most difficult parts of the process to get right… we ALWAYS write too long! – and also to check that stuff is funny and that everything works. Oscar, who is the officially the head writer, and Elizabeth always do what we call an ‘anal probe’ on the script just before we record it. This is when we get really picky and fussy about sentence structure and things like that. We usually need to do some very brutal editing at this stage. But the writing process isn’t quite finished even then… we often need to write new dialogue to suit the pictures as they are completed, so we are often adding script right up until the very end. We tend to have between 30 and 40 scenes in a script.