Find your people
Four writers – Nicole Amarteifio, Kodie Bedford, Zara Hayes and Cat Jones – discuss how they started working in television, their latest projects and why screenwriters need to find the producers who will back their ideas. Despite spending five years working for the prison service, Cat Jones never stopped pursuing her ambitions to write for stage and screen. Writing plays and running an arts programme with inmates, she found a route into the television industry open up when she became a consultant on ITV drama Prisoners’ Wives. “I spent a bit of time in the writers’ room, helping to generate ideas and things, and it was a great experience,” she said. “Actually, I did that thing of saying to the lead writer on that show, ‘I’ve written a play. Would you read my play?’ She did read it and she passed it on to her agent, and then her agent got in contact and said she would be interested in representing me.” Jones went on to write for shows including Doctors and EastEnders, and later as a guest writer on series such as Harlots and Wolfe, before finally landing her own primetime drama, the BBC’s Jenna Coleman-led detective series The Jetty. “I’ve just been kind of working and working and at the same time developing my own ideas, of which The Jetty is the first one that I’ve managed to get over the line.” Jones joined Nicole Amarteifio, Kodie Bedford and Zara Hayes on a Writers to Watch panel at … Continue reading Find your people
