THE PLOT THICKENS

Picture the scene - you're walking down the street when you're suddenly seized with a bolt of searing pain in the chest. You think - maybe I shouldn't have wolfed that kebab so fast - then blam! Next thing you know you're being hurled in a gurney, ER-style, to be told, don't panic, your cardiac arrest's about to be sorted by the house plumber, just as soon as he pulls his arm out of the S-bend.

It's a well-known fact that anybody can be a screenwriter. Go ask the Script Factory, who seem to think the nation's screen scribblers are fighting off offers, so much so that they're on the look-out for underemployed playwrights and novelists for their Writer's Circle scheme. Noble as their initiative appears, I ask myself - what does this say about all those screenwriters already out there trying to scratch a few quid? Most of us wannabes are hardly in it for the cashola, at least not by the time we get ripped off by producers, our rights grabbed by public bean-counters and sundry TV Tarts and if we're really lucky, mugged by our agents to boot.

Unless you're Harold Pinter, (who can pick and choose his gigs) to claim a novelist or playwright can automatically write a decent film script is wishful thinking. Transferring skills is all very well, but schemes like this show a woeful but all-too-typical up yours for the craft of writing for the screen. Welcome to UK film, Britain's biggest not-for-profit business where with enough 'training', anybody with two fingers can toss off a great script.

To be sure, the road to Hollywood has long been littered with the corpses of literary hacks lured by filthy lucre, but that's Hollywood. Back in Blighty, where the notion of cinematic writing is an alien concept (oh, is it not a tad short on dialogue?) you're lucky to get your bus fare home and a cheese sandwich - and that's after turning in a free draft.

And there's the rub-a-dub. Cash-starved UK producers constantly bemoan the fact there's no scripts out there worth wiping their arse on. Trouble is, they can't get their mitts on the Lottery dev pot unless they produce the goods, which means some hapless, unwaged screenwriter has to give it away. And if the script's rubbish to start with, it's only bound to get worse by the time a coven of so-called development execs get their claws into it, an ordeal on a par with a bikini wax and surely an eye-opener for pampered playwrights unused to having their work ritually shredded.

We all know the story of Robert Riskin, a Hollywood hack who once threw 120 blank pages on Frank Capra's desk, declaring, try giving that the Capra touch. And he was on the pay roll, which is more than you can say for the average UK scribbler. Personally I wouldn't dream of having my fillings done by a plasterer or my hair dyed by a car mechanic. Scriptwriting's a hard enough game without the open season, thank you. Gosh, I'm beginning to sound like a writer. Maybe I should write a book...