Fi Phillips

Brought up as an only child in a house full of books that I was given free rein to investigate, the books that I always found myself drawn to were theatre scripts, and most specifically two collections of Shakespeare's plays. The one with the green cover in the photo belonged to my mum. The other collection, a children's version of Shakespeare's plays with certain sections summarised rather than printed in full, was my father's. I spent many an hour as a child and teenager, thumbing through these books, visualising them on stage, playing the parts in my mind and yes, reciting the speeches in my bedroom - quietly. At high school, I was keen to learn more about the plays but equally disappointed when my enthusiasm wasn't shared by many of my friends, and horrified when certain teachers presented the plays in a way that not only bored their class but turned many people off Shakespeare for life. The works of Shakespeare are treated as part of the British, if not...

My parents were frequent visitors to the theatre, taking me to our local Theatre Royal at least once a month, and each December we would see a pantomime. As a child, the romance of the principal boy and girl was pleasant enough but I would wait excitedly for the Dame to come on. Dressed in garish colours, with a suitcase of jokes and one-liners, the Dame and her put-upon sidekick would make my night.

If you follow me on Twitter , then you'll know that my current writing project is a TV script based on one of my murder mystery plays. I'm accustomed to writing scripts for the stage and had assumed that writing a script for television would be, well, the same. How wrong I was. When writing a theatre script, I provide dialogue, setting and basic stage directions (entrances, exits, the occasional onstage move). I like to leave the interpretation of the script down to the director and actor. Over the years, I've stopped adding comments to dialogue like 'nervously' or 'sheepishly' and now leave that decision down to the theatre group involved. When I started reading through TV scripts and writing my own, however, I quickly became aware that the story is told very differently. Whereas with one of my theatre scripts I supply the skeleton and perhaps some muscle, it is the actor who fleshes out the role and provides the heart. With a television script, however, I ...